Peter Beinart | The Atlantichttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/2018-02-20T09:50:39-05:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p dir="ltr">The astonishing thing about Donald Trump’s response to Robert Mueller’s recent indictments is his inability to recognize that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is about something bigger than him. Look closely at Trump’s tweets.</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964594780088033282">February 16</a>: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion!”</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965079126829871104">February 17</a>: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965202556204003328">February 18</a>: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia - it never did!”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p dir="ltr">Each tweet makes basically the same point: “Sure, Russia may have tried to undermine American democracy. But what really matters is that I never colluded with Putin and won the presidency fair and square.” Even if you believe that Trump is right—that his campaign never assisted Russia’s efforts to swing the election in his favor and that Russia’s efforts had no material effect on its outcome—the narcissism is breathtaking. It’s like Franklin Roosevelt going before a Joint Session of Congress on December 8, 1941, and declaring: “Sure, Japan bombed Hawaii. But there’s no evidence I knew the attack was coming or that my decision to impose oil sanctions on Tokyo contributed in any way.” Or George W. Bush declaring the day after September 11: “Sure, Al Qaeda just took down the Twin Towers. But there’s nothing my administration could have done to stop it. If anyone deserves blame, it’s my sleazy predecessor, Bill.” </p><p dir="ltr">Trump can’t grasp that what matters most about the Russia attack is not what it reveals about his political legitimacy but, what it reveals about America’s national vulnerability. He keeps focusing on how Russia’s meddling affects him; not how it affects the country.</p><p dir="ltr">There’s an irony here. Trump often sounds like the most nationalistic president in modern American history. Again and again he has accused his political opponents of favoring non-Americans—undocumented immigrants, foreign countries, international corporations—over American citizens. George W. Bush frequently invoked a universal God. Trump more often invokes the sanctity of the American nation. In his September <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly/">speech</a> at the United Nations, he used the word “sovereignty” 21 times. In his <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/">inaugural address</a> he declared that, “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”</p><p dir="ltr">How can a president supposedly so devoted to sovereignty be so nonchalant about a foreign power’s effort to sway an American election? The answer has to do with the kind of nationalist that Trump is. Although Trump sometimes talks like a civic nationalist—someone who emphasizes the things that all Americans share regardless of background—he often acts like an ethnic nationalist: someone who sees true Americanism as bound up with a particular ethnic, racial, or religious identity. This ethnic nationalism underlay his obsession with proving that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. It undergirds his preference for Norwegian immigrants over those from “shithole” countries in Africa and the Caribbean. And it undergirds his nostalgia for an earlier, “great” America in which a higher percentage of Americans were white and Christian, and in which their political and cultural dominance was less contested.</p><p dir="ltr">What does this have to do with Trump’s response to Mueller’s expose of Russia’s election meddling? A civic nationalist would have responded by explaining the common danger to all Americans. But instead of emphasizing the danger to America, Trump emphasized the danger to himself, and, by extension, his party and his tribe. And the danger to his, tribal, version of Americanism stems not from Russia’s meddling but from the people who would use it to undermine his legitimacy and power.</p><p dir="ltr">Moscow, apparently, tried to divide America along racial, religious, ideological, and partisan lines. And in Trump, it had the good fortune to find a president whose brand of nationalism does exactly that.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / Reuters The Flawed Nationalism of Donald Trump2018-02-20T06:00:00-05:002018-02-20T09:11:16-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553721The president can’t grasp that what matters most about the Russia attack is not what it reveals about his political legitimacy but what it reveals about America’s national vulnerability.<p>Since earlier this month, when Congress passed a budget deal that massively boosts both defense and non-defense spending, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/obamas-gone-so-republicans-stopped-sabotaging-the-economy.html">liberal</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/opinion/republicans-hawks-markets.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=opinion&amp;region=stream&amp;module=stream_unit&amp;version=latest&amp;contentPlacement=5&amp;pgtype=collection">commentators</a>—and even some <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/08/politics/rand-paul-spending-agreement/index.html">Republican politicians</a>—have accused the GOP of hypocrisy. Republicans, they noted, are supposed to loathe debt. They’re supposed to loathe government spending. Yet, in large numbers, they voted for much more of both.</p><p>Fair enough. But what about the Democrats? If Republicans are supposed to worry about the United States bankrupting itself with social-welfare spending, aren’t Democrats supposed to worry about the United States bankrupting itself with military spending? Not anymore. In the run-up to the deal, Nancy Pelosi’s office fired off an email to House Democrats proclaiming that, “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.” Chuck Schumer’s office announced that, “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request.” Not all congressional Democrats voted for the budget agreement: <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/h69">Thirty-eight percent of Democrats</a> backed it in the House and <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2018/s31">76 percent</a> did in the Senate. But even those who voted no mostly did so because they were upset about its lack of protection for immigrant “dreamers”—not because they oppose a higher defense budget. Last year, in fact, when Democrats were offered a standalone vote on big increases in military spending—in the form of <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/14/house-passes-defense-policy-bill-240561">House</a> and <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2017/09/18/us-senate-passes-budget-busting-700-billion-ndaa/">Senate</a> defense authorization bills—large majorities in both bodies voted yes.</p><p>What makes this so remarkable is that the arguments for a large increase in defense spending are extraordinarily weak.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Those arguments can be divided into two types: The first is that America needs a much bigger military budget because the world has gotten much more dangerous. The second is that America needs a much bigger military budget to make up for the savage cuts of the Obama years.</p><p>Start with argument number one. <a href="https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">The National Defense Strategy</a>, which the Trump administration issued in January to buttress its call for higher defense spending, declares that, “We are facing increased global disorder … creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.” In other words, threats are increasing. But if you look back at previous Pentagon documents you realize that threats are always increasing. The Pentagon’s <a href="http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Publications/2015_National_Military_Strategy.pdf">2015 National Military Strategy</a> (not to be confused with the National Defense Strategy) begins with then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey declaring that, “Today’s global security environment is the most unpredictable I have seen in 40 years of service.” In 2014, the Pentagon’s <a href="http://archive.defense.gov/pubs/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf">Quadrennial Defense Review</a> (which the National Defense Strategy <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/home/2016/04/25/qdr-dead-in-2017-defense-policy-bill/">replaces</a>, confused yet?) warned of “a world that is growing more volatile, more unpredictable, and in some instances more threatening to the United States.” In 2010, the United States <a href="https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/QDR/QDR_as_of_29JAN10_1600.pdf">faced</a> “a complex and uncertain security landscape in which the pace of change continues to accelerate.” In <a href="http://archive.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/QDR20060203.pdf">2006</a>, it confronted “the increasingly dangerous security challenges of the 21st century.” The world, in other words, is always getting more complicated, more uncertain, more disorderly and more frightening—and the Pentagon always needs more money to deal with it.</p><p>But has the world actually become more dangerous in ways that this boost in defense spending will remedy? For the last decade and a half, the threat that worried the Defense Department most was jihadist terrorism. For the last few years, the jihadist terrorist group that worried it most was ISIS. Yet in his <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/">State of the Union Address</a>, Donald Trump declared himself “proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers.” In other words, the organization that was most frequently blamed in recent years for making the world scarier and scarier has just lost virtually its entire base of operations. Yet the world is getting scarier nonetheless.</p><p>As if to preempt this objection, this year’s <a href="https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">National Defense Strategy</a> declares that, “Interstate strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” But if the United States is no longer as worried about terrorism and yet the world is becoming more dangerous overall because of “strategic competition” with other great powers, then those great powers—China and Russia—must have become a lot more dangerous in a short time.</p><p>One might argue that Russia, because of its meddling in the 2016 election, actually has become a lot more dangerous. The problem with using Russian hacking to justify a bigger defense budget is that the Trump administration devotes only a tiny percentage of its funding boost to countering it. Trump plans to spend <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/2/12/17004456/trump-2019-budget-defense-686-billion">$716 billion</a> on defense in Fiscal Year 2019 (which starts this October). Of that, <a href="http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2018/02/trump-2019-budget-spikes-cyber-spending-cuts-research/145925/">$8.5 billion</a>—a bit more than 1 percent—is allocated to the Pentagon’s budget for cyber defense. Another chunk of money—the figures are classified but Gordon Adams, who oversaw the national-security and foreign policy budgets at the Office of Management and Budget during much of the Clinton administration, estimates it at perhaps $10 billion—is going to the National Security Agency. Add that in and you’re between 2 and 3 percent of Trump’s defense budget. In fact, Trump is raising the public part of the cyber defense budget by a much smaller percentage (4.2 percent) than he’s raising the defense budget overall (more than 11 percent). The military may worry about Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine and Syria too, but in terms of conventional military strength, Russia is hardly a real threat to the United States. So unless Vladimir Putin is planning on bombing America’s polling booths in 2020, it’s hard to see how Russia’s election meddling justifies Trump’s huge defense increases much at all.</p><p>For its part, China is a formidable long-term “strategic competitor” to the United States. But that’s not exactly news. Hillary Clinton announced a “<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/">pivot</a>” of America’s national-security focus to Asia way back in 2011. China’s growing military power may well justify increasing U.S. defense spending for Asia. But given that the Pentagon is now less worried about jihadist terrorism, shouldn’t that free up some more money for containing China? What exactly has China done since Trump took office that requires the Pentagon to boost its budget by a whopping 11 percent between Fiscal Years 2017 and 2019 even as it concedes that terrorism—formerly the number one threat—is now no longer the major worry? When I asked a version of this question to Gordon Adams he explained that “Threats are always better for budgets than peace.”</p><p>The second major justification for a big boost in military spending is that as a result of budget caps passed in 2011 (which Trump wrongly dubs a “sequester”), the Obama administration’s defense budgets were dangerously low. The National Defense Strategy <a href="https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf">warns</a> that the Pentagon endured “a period of strategic atrophy” in which “Our backlog of deferred readiness, procurement, and modernization requirements has grown.” In his State of the Union address, Trump <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/">demanded</a> that Congress “end the dangerous defense sequester.”</p><p>But the budget caps didn’t slash defense spending. It’s a myth. According to Todd Harrison, the director of Defense Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, total defense spending did decline from $714 billion in FY 2010 to a low of $586 billion in FY 2015. That sounds like a big drop. But it’s almost entirely because, between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. largely pulled its troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.</p><p>In 2010, the United States had 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs of keeping them there were mostly paid through something called the Overseas Contingency Operations Fund (OCO), which is supposed to pay for temporary expenditures like wars. Between FY 2010 and 2015, OCO spending went down from $163 billion to $63 billion, which makes sense when you realize that by 2015 the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had dropped to only 10,000. Take away the OCO and look only at the Pentagon’s “base budget”—which covers everything except ongoing wars—and the gap between FY 2010 and the depth of the supposed defense spending “atrophy” in FY 2015 drops to only $28 billion.</p><p>But even that overstates the drop. Even as troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq fell, the Pentagon kept spending $63 billion for what it claimed was war fighting. How did it do that? By shifting roughly $30 billion that should have been in its base budget into the OCO because the OCO was not subject to budget caps. By doing so, the Pentagon made it appear that the base budget was $28 billion lower in FY 2015 than it had been in FY 2010. But that was an accounting gimmick. Had the $30 billion been in the base budget, where it belonged, it would have been clear that—when you subtract actual war-fighting—the Pentagon’s budget in FY 2015 was almost exactly what it had been in FY 2010, before the budget caps began.</p><p>Ironically, one of the members of Congress who denounced this budget-busting accounting trick was <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2016/12/19/trump-selects-oco-opponent-mulvaney-for-omb/">Mick Mulvaney</a>, who is now Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget. But he couldn’t stop it. The Pentagon kept that $30 billion in the OCO for the rest of the Obama administration, even as the base budget began going back up. By Obama’s last year in office, notes Harrison, overall defense spending (including the OCO) was higher in inflation-adjusted terms that at any point since World War II.</p><p>Yes, that’s right. The supposedly atrophied defense budget from which Trump is rescuing America was itself higher in constant dollars than the defense budget at the height of the Vietnam War or the Reagan buildup. Which helps explain why in 2016, in an essay in <em><a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2016-07-22/america-s-awesome-military">Foreign Affairs</a></em>, General David Petraeus and the Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon declared that, “America’s awesome military” had “few, if any, weaknesses” and that “No radical changes or major buildups are needed.”</p><p>In fact, not only does the American military not require a “major buildup” to be “awesome,” it could probably be awesome for a lot less. In 2015, the Defense Review Board—a panel of corporate leaders and management consultants appointed by the Pentagon itself—looked at the Department’s “back office” activities: things like “accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.” The Board estimated that simply by making these non-battlefield functions more efficient, the Pentagon could save $25 billion per year, almost the entire budget of the State Department. But none of these savings occurred because, as Bob Woodward <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.99882cdf2680">reported</a>, “The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.”</p><p>Adams, who oversaw the defense budget at OMB for part of the 1990s, told me he thought the $25 billion figure was low. The actual potential savings are probably higher. It’s impossible to know for sure because the Pentagon has never produced an auditable financial statement. This is despite the fact that Congress in <a href="https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-pentagons-audit-readiness-remains-elusive-goal">1990 passed a law</a> requiring that every federal department do so by 1992. Every department has, except the Pentagon. In 2009, Congress passed another law specifically requiring that the Pentagon produce a financial statement that outside experts could examine. It still hasn’t. When the accounting firm Ernst and Young last year audited just one section of the Pentagon, the Defense Logistics Agency, it found, in the words of <em><a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/05/pentagon-logistics-agency-review-funds-322860">Politico</a></em>, which broke the story, that the Agency’s “financial management is so weak that its leaders and oversight bodies have no reliable way to track the huge sums it's responsible for.”</p><p>Despite all this, many Democrats agreed to boost defense spending <a href="http://college.usatoday.com/2015/05/19/bernie-sanders-issues-bill-to-make-4-year-colleges-tuition-free/">by more</a> than what Bernie Sanders estimates it would cost to make every four-year public college and university in America tuition-free and by more than what Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University, <a href="http://time.com/money/5032445/cost-fix-opioid-crisis/">estimates</a> it would cost to end the opioid crisis.</p><p>The vote illustrates how strange a beast the contemporary Democratic Party has become. On domestic policy—immigration, criminal justice, health care—the party is moving left. On foreign and defense policy, the party barely exists. This month’s budget deal was a perfect example. Some Democrats voted for it because the agreement boosted domestic spending. Others voted against it because it didn’t take care of immigrant “dreamers.” The huge increase in military spending didn’t matter much one way or the other.</p><p>No wonder Pentagon leaders are happy. The one party that might be ideologically inclined to question their spending habits has decided it doesn’t care.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / ReutersThe Democrats Keep Capitulating on Defense Spending2018-02-18T11:50:18-05:002018-02-18T11:50:19-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553670On domestic policy, the party is moving left. On foreign and defense policy, the party barely exists.<p>A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “Dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.</p><p>Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-calls-senate-support-grassley-bill-oppose-bills-fail-deliver-american-people/%20https:/www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-calls-senate-support-grassley-bill-oppose-bills-fail-deliver-american-people/">announced</a> on Wednesday that he would legalize the “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall <em>and</em> ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio <a href="http://time.com/3820475/transcript-read-full-text-of-sen-marco-rubios-campaign-launch/">launched</a> his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/ted-cruz-turns-legal-immigration-n463226">declared</a> in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/2012/Mitt_Romney_Immigration.htm">promised</a> in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”</p><p>Trump has turned that distinction on its head. He’s willing to legalize the “Dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than those who don’t.</p><p>What explains this? Trump’s great hidden advantage during the 2016 Republican presidential primary was his lack of support from the GOP political and donor class. This allowed him to jettison positions—in support of free trade, in support of the Iraq War, in support of cutting Medicare and Social Security—that enjoyed support among Republican elites but little support among Republican voters. He did the same on immigration, where the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction turned out to be much more popular among the party’s leaders than among its grassroots. Cribbing from Ann Coulter’s book, <em>Adios America</em>, Trump replaced the legal-illegal distinction with one that turned out to have more resonance on the activist right: The distinction between white Christian immigrants and non-white, and non-Christian ones.</p><p>The words “illegal immigration” do not appear in Trump’s <a href="http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">presidential announcement speech</a>. Instead, Trump focused on immigrants’ country of origin. “When Mexico sends its people,” he declared, “they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists … It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.”</p><p>Trump, who often says bluntly what other Republicans say in code, probably realized that “illegal immigrant” was, for many voters, already a euphemism for Latino or Mexican-immigrants. In their book <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10516.html"><em>White Backlash</em></a>, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal cite a poll showing that 61 percent of Americans believe that most Latino immigrants are undocumented even though only about a quarter are. “When Americans talk about undocumented immigrants, Latinos or immigrants in general,” they note, “the images in their heads are likely to be the same.”</p><p>What really drove Republican opinion about immigration, Trump realized, was not primarily the fear that the United States was becoming a country of law-breakers. (Republicans, after all, were not outraged about the lack of prosecution of tax cheats.) It was the fear that the United States—which was becoming less white and had just elected a president of Kenyan descent—was becoming a third-world country.</p><p>When the <a href="https://www.prri.org/spotlight/do-americans-think-too-many-immigrants-are-coming-to-the-u-s-it-depends-on-their-country-of-origin/">Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution</a> asked Americans in 2016 their views of immigration from different parts of the world, it found that Republicans were only three points more likely than Democrats to want to reduce immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” and only seven points more likely to want to reduce immigration from Europe. By contrast, they were 33 points more likely to support reducing immigration from Mexico and Central America and 41 points more likely to support reducing immigration from “predominantly Muslim countries.” What really drives Republican views about immigrants, in other words, is less their legal status than their nation of origin, their religion, and their race.</p><p>Trump grasped that during the campaign, and in coalition with a bevy of current and former Southern Senators—Jeff Sessions, David Perdue and Tom Cotton—he has used it to turn the GOP into a party devoted to slashing legal immigration. On Thursday, when presented with a bill that traded the legalization of Dreamers for more border security but did not reduce legal immigration, only <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17003552/senate-immigration-bill-floor-debate">eight Republican Senators</a> voted yes. However, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/15/17017682/senate-immigration-daca-bill-vote-failed">37 voted for a bill</a> that legalized the “Dreamers,” added more border security, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17003552/senate-immigration-bill-floor-debate">substantially reduced legal immigration</a>.</p><p>But there’s another reason Trump has succeeded in erasing the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction that for years governed GOP immigration debate. He’s made Republicans less concerned with legality in general. In 2012, the GOP—which was then-outraged by executive orders that supposedly displayed President Barack Obama’s contempt for the constitutional limits of his office—titled the immigration section of its platform, “<a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/papers_pdf/101961.pdf">The Rule of Law: Legal Immigration</a>.” The seven paragraph-section used variations of the word “law” 14 times.</p><p>That emphasis is harder now. In his ongoing battles with the FBI, Justice Department, judiciary, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Trump has convinced many Republicans that the “rule of law” is often a cloak for the partisan biases of the “deep state.” As a result, Republicans are now <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republican-confidence-in-the-fbi-has-dropped-since-2015_us_5a721bbbe4b09a544b5616a7">22 points</a> less likely to hold a positive opinion of the FBI than they were in 2015.</p><p>What really matters for many Republicans in Trump’s standoff with Mueller and the FBI is not who has the law on their side, since the bureaucracy can twist the law to its own advantage. What really matters is who enjoys the backing of “the people,” the authentic America that resides outside the swamp, a construct that definitely does not include the imagined beneficiaries of “chain migration” and the “visa lottery.”</p><p>In the Trump era, Republicans now justify their immigration views less by reference to law than by reference to tribe. Which, not coincidentally, is how they justify Trump’s presidency itself.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedLenny Ignelzi / APIn this August 2015, photo, a woman approaches the entrance to the Mexico border crossing in San Ysidro, California.It's Not Illegal Immigration That Worries Republicans Anymore2018-02-18T06:00:00-05:002018-02-20T09:50:39-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-553631The Trump-era GOP cares more about the national origin and race of immigrants than the methods they used to enter the United States.<p>“Washington has a long habit of painting its enemies 10 feet tall—and crazy,” as Fareed Zakaria <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/year-living-fearfully-109669">once noted</a>. Thus, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in December <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2017/12/03/h-r-mcmaster-talks-north-korea-threat-michael-flynn-deal.html">called</a> North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program—which according to American intelligence still probably lacks the capacity to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear weapon—“the most destabilizing development, I think, in the post-World War II period.” More destabilizing, evidently, than Stalin or Mao’s far larger nuclear arsenals; or the break-up of the British, French, and Soviet empires; or the rise of China; or a changing climate that could soon make major cities uninhabitable. If Pyongyang’s nuclear program is allowed to proceed, McMaster continued, North Korea—whose GDP is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-who-would-win-in-a-war-between-north-and-south-korea-2016-4">one-50th the size of South Korea’s and which spends one-fifth as much on its military</a>—might “reunify the [Korean] peninsula under the red banner.”</p><p>Depicting North Korea’s nuclear program as an expression of its geopolitical might is exactly wrong. The program is actually a result of the North’s extraordinary weakness. Which is why the Trump administration’s strategy of threatening Pyongyang with war—and making it feel even more imperiled—is exactly the wrong way to curb its nuclear program. Kim Jong Un possesses nuclear weapons, above all, to deter an American attack. Thus, the best way to limit his arsenal is to help him deter such an attack without nukes. That’s the rationale behind Naval War College Professor Lyle Goldstein’s wildly counterintuitive, and oddly compelling, proposal: The United States should ask China and Russia to deploy troops on North Korean soil.</p><p>To understand Goldstein’s reasoning, it’s necessary to grasp how North Korea’s increasing weakness has propelled its nuclear program. The Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan has <a href="https://fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Why_Do_States_Build_Nuclear_Weapons.pdf">observed</a> that “most international relations scholars have a clear and simple answer” to why countries develop nuclear weapons. They do so “when they face a significant military threat to their security that cannot be met through alternative means.” Over the last half-century, the military threats to North Korea have swelled while its alternative means of protecting itself have withered. Thus, Pyongyang’s obsessive pursuit of nukes.</p><p>First, consider the shifting balance of power between Pyongyang and Seoul. North Korea has long had a smaller population than South Korea. But until the early 1970s, the two countries had <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130726191655/http:/intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/institutions-matter-real-capita-gdp-north-and-south-korea">roughly the same</a> per capita GDP. Today, South Korea’s is <a href="https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/south-korea.north-korea/economy">roughly 23 times higher</a>. <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41228181">Ninety-two percent</a> of South Korea’s roads are paved. In the North, it’s 3 percent. The average South Korean <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41228181">lives more than a decade longer</a> than her North Korean counterpart, and is between one and three inches taller.</p><p>North Korea has tried to keep pace militarily by devoting as much as one-quarter of its GDP to defense. And it does have more men under arms than the South does. But the technological gap between the two nations’ militaries has grown more and more extreme. North Korea’s most common fighter plane was <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-who-would-win-in-a-war-between-north-and-south-korea-2016-4">unveiled in 1953</a>. The South, according to a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-who-would-win-in-a-war-between-north-and-south-korea-2016-4">2011 Center for Strategic and International Studies report</a>, has “achieved a massive lead in modern aircraft and surface-to-air missiles.” The same pattern holds true on land. North Korea, notes Goldstein, has “tanks from the 1950s and it doesn’t have gas for those tanks and it can’t feed the soldiers who man them.”</p><p>But this is only part of the story. North Korea hasn’t only grown weaker vis-á-vis South Korea, it’s grown weaker vis-á-vis the great powers as well. During the Cold War, North and South Korea each had important patrons, which fought alongside them during the Korean War. Then, in 1991, the North’s most powerful ally, the Soviet Union, collapsed. Its successor state, Russia, annulled its mutual-assistance treaty with Pyongyang and opened diplomatic relations with Seoul. By 1992, the Russian and South Korean navies were visiting each other’s ports.</p><p>At around the same time, North Korea’s other major ally, China, began cozying up to South Korea too, and trade between the two nations quickly surpassed trade between Beijing and Pyongyang. (South Korea is now China’s <a href="http://www.worldstopexports.com/chinas-top-import-partners/">fourth-largest trading partner</a>. North Korea is not in the top 15.) China’s relationship with North Korea, by contrast, grew increasingly chilly. In his book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/No-Exit-Nuclear-International-Security/dp/0415670837">No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security</a></em>, Jonathan Pollack notes that North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, visited China every year. His successor, Kim Jong Il, who took power in 1994, didn’t visit until 2000. </p><p>All this would have been more bearable for Pyongyang had it improved its relationship with Seoul’s Cold War ally, the United States. But that didn’t happen. Nor did North Korea’s relationship improve with Japan. Instead, the United States—newly confident that dictatorships were on their way out across the globe—waited expectantly for North Korea to go the way of East Germany. Pyongyang found it particularly unnerving that the U.S. continued its annual military exercises with South Korea even after the Cold War’s end. A congressman who met Kim Il Sung in 1993 <a href="https://www.38north.org/2014/02/rcollins022714/#_ftn10">reported</a> that when discussing the U.S.-South Korean war games, the North Korean leader’s voice “quivered and his hands shook with anger.”</p><p>“It is perhaps still hard for most people to appreciate how profound the North Koreans’ sense of crisis was” as a result of these tectonic shifts, <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/north-korean-nuclear-issue-fu-ying.pdf">writes</a> Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the Academic Committee of the National Institute of Global Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. North Korea began its nuclear program, under Soviet tutelage, in the 1950s. But it’s unlikely Moscow wanted Pyongyang to actually develop a bomb, and had the USSR stuck around, North Korea would have had less desire to. “The events of the early 1990s deeply upset North Korea and led to its decision to go its own way,” writes Fu, “including by making the “‘nuclear choice.’” In 1990, American satellites captured evidence that the North had constructed a secret nuclear facility at Yongbyon.</p><p>Since then, North Korea’s geopolitical position has only grown worse. As a result of the 1994 Agreed Framework—which shut down Yongbyon—the Clinton administration in 2000 pledged that it had no “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/04/19/how-washington-hard-liners-helped-to-create-the-north-korean-crisis/?utm_term=.81ed6c4ce3cf">hostile intent</a>” towards Pyongyang. But <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/democrats-north-korea/532770/?utm_source=feed">both North Korea and the United States violated the agreement</a>, and when the Bush administration took power, it refused to reaffirm America’s lack of hostile intent. To the contrary, George W. Bush labelled North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” and then invaded Iraq. Undersecretary of State John Bolton instructed Pyongyang to “<a href="https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/n-korea-is-no-place-apply-iraq-lessons">draw the appropriate lesson</a>.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>North Korea has since watched America topple yet another dictator who lacked nuclear weapons: Muammar Qaddafi. It’s seen the U.S. practice “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-drills-us-south-korea-practice-striking-norths-nuclear-plants/2016/03/06/46e6019d-5f04-4277-9b41-e02fc1c2e801_story.html?utm_term=.7ac2f0bf17d5">decapitation raids</a>” against its own regime. It’s watched Donald Trump <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-assassinating-north-korean-leader-kim-jong-un-china-role/">declare</a>, in response to a question about assassinating Kim Jong Un, that “I’ve heard of worse things.” And it’s seen the Trump administration both <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/02/politics/donald-trump-north-korea-nuclear/index.html">threaten</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/us/politics/military-exercises-north-korea-pentagon.html">mobilize for</a>, war.</p><p>It’s also watched China, its last ally, tilt even more heavily toward Seoul. Since he became China’s leader in 2012, Xi Jinping has met his South Korean counterparts <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2015/09/north-koreas-growing-isolation/">seven</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/world/asia/china-south-korea-xi-jinping.html">times</a>. <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2015/09/north-koreas-growing-isolation/">He hasn’t met Kim Jong Un once</a>. Beijing has <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-north-korea-relationship">backed sanctions</a> against the North at the United Nations. Chinese officials have even declared that they <a href="http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-not-obliged-to-defend-north-korea-from-an-attack">no longer feel bound</a> to defend Pyongyang under the Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty that the two countries signed in 1961.</p><p>When it comes to security, in other words, North Korea sees nukes as just about all it has left.</p><p>The problem with North Korea’s nuclear weapons is not that Kim Jong Un plans to use them. He has shown no inclination toward suicide. It’s that he runs a cloistered, paranoid regime, which lacks good channels of communication with a White House that is fairly cloistered and paranoid itself. There’s also the danger that North Korea might grow so economically desperate that it sells some of its nuclear technology to actors even worse than itself. </p><p>But if you want North Korea to abandon, or even limit, its nuclear arsenal, you must convince its leaders that they can do so and still survive. That’s especially difficult after the Libya intervention, since Kim watched Qaddafi abandon his nuclear program as part of a rapprochement with America, only to be later toppled by America anyway. At this point, the promises of non-belligerence that Clinton offered in 2000—even accompanied by a halt to U.S.-South Korean military exercises—aren’t likely to be enough.</p><p>Which is why American policymakers need to think more boldly. Rajan Menon of The City College of New York has <a href="https://www.cato.org/multimedia/events/how-do-you-solve-problem-north-korea-panel-2-new-approaches-solving-north-korea">suggested</a> promising North Korea that if it abandons its nukes, U.S. troops will leave South Korea. But—in addition to weakening America’s position in Asia—an American withdrawal might tempt Seoul, and perhaps Tokyo, to develop their own nuclear weapons. Which would leave the North just as vulnerable as it is now, and make it cling just as hard to its nukes.</p><p>Lyle Goldstein’s idea—which he mentions briefly in his 2015 book, <em><a href="http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/meeting-china-halfway">Meeting China Halfway</a></em>, and has elaborated on since—is different. Instead of U.S. troops leaving the South, small numbers of Chinese and perhaps Russian troops would, with Pyongyang’s permission, deploy in the North.</p><p>There’s little chance these forces would embolden Kim Jong Un. To the contrary, they would likely restrain him, since China and Russia both value their relationship with Seoul. But the deployments would make an American or South Korean attack on the North almost impossible. Even the Trump administration—which is frighteningly willing to contemplate war with Pyongyang—is unlikely to risk killing Chinese and Russian troops and thus provoking war with Moscow and Beijing. Thus, Kim Jong Un might gain the security to begin curbing, and perhaps even eventually scrapping, his nuclear program. He’d also gain prestige. Receiving Chinese and Russian troops would constitute a major stature boost for a leader who right now can’t get a meeting with Xi Jinping.</p><p>There are plenty of reasons to believe this won’t happen. Pyongyang might fear that allowing in Chinese troops would threaten its sovereignty. Perhaps those troops would even take part in a coup. For its part, China doesn’t like stationing troops abroad. (Russia has fewer compunctions.) On the other hand, from a Chinese perspective, war between North and South Korea—followed by either chaos or a peninsula unified under American auspices—would be even worse.</p><p>Then there’s Washington, where Goldstein’s proposal turns conventional foreign-policy thinking upside down. Americans generally assume that the greater America’s military advantage in a given area, the safer America is. To suggest that America might enhance its security by welcoming Chinese and Russian troops back to the Korean Peninsula—at the very moment the Trump announces <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-china-russia/u-s-military-puts-great-power-competition-at-heart-of-strategy-mattis-idUSKBN1F81TR">a new era of great power-competition</a>—is head-spinningly contrarian. So is the notion that America might support propping up a regime that Trump has, rightly, called evil.</p><p>But radical asymmetries of power haven’t always served America well in the post-Cold War era. They didn’t serve America well when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, two other countries orphaned by the demise of their former Soviet sponsor. And they don’t serve America well when they accelerate North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.</p><p>Moreover, Russian and Chinese deployments might not prolong the North Korean regime. They might instead lower tensions, which would permit closer ties between Seoul and Pyongyang, and let South Korea’s economic and cultural appeal eat away at North Korean totalitarianism from within. It’s worth remembering that the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which at the time appeared to affirm the Cold War division of Europe, ended up undermining it by empowering dissidents in the East. There’s no guarantee, of course. But if the last 25 years of American sanctions and military maneuvers were designed to liberate the North Korean people, they’ve been a dismal failure.</p><p>It says something about the foreign-policy debate in Washington that Goldstein’s proposal is probably too radical to receive a serious hearing while the proposal McMaster and Trump keep floating—a “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-signs-of-a-thaw-in-north-korea-tensions-bubble-up-1515427541">bloody nose</a>” strike that could spark a war that kills millions in Seoul alone—is considered a legitimate subject of debate. Maybe it’s not our adversaries who are crazy. Maybe it’s us.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedReuters via KNCANorth Korean soldiers during the 69th founding anniversary of the country at Mansudae hill in Pyongyang, North Korea, on September 9, 2017. The Weirdest—and Possibly Best—Proposal to Resolve the North Korea Crisis2018-02-08T13:07:29-05:002018-02-08T13:07:30-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-552794The administration is nowhere near out of peaceful options.<p>The more closely you read Donald Trump’s comments about North Korea in his State of the Union address, the more plausible it becomes that he is preparing for war.</p><p>First, there’s the sheer emphasis he placed on the subject. In his speech, Trump devoted a mere sentence to Russia and China. He devoted 23 words to Israel, 34 to Afghanistan, and 48 to Iran. Even the war against ISIS, which Trump cites as the main foreign-policy achievement of his first year in office, garnered only 302 words. North Korea received 475.</p><p>Second, there are the things Trump didn’t say. The Olympics begin in South Korea in 10 days, and the South Korean government hopes participation by athletes from the North will ease hostility on the Peninsula. But Trump didn’t mention the games. In fact, he didn’t mention diplomacy at all.</p><p>Even more strikingly, he didn’t mention either sanctions or China. For close to a year, the Trump administration has been urging Beijing to increase economic pressure on North Korea. It’s also repeatedly congratulated itself for having passed the toughest-ever United Nation sanctions against Pyongyang. In a speech devoted in large measure to trumpeting his achievements, one might have expected Trump to mention those sanctions again. But he did not, nor did he ask China to further help in isolating Kim Jong Un’s regime. Instead of “sanctions,” Trump referred to America’s “campaign of maximum pressure,” a phrase that could cover military as well as economic means. The sanctions strategy requires some degree of American patience. Trump’s attack on the “complacency” of past administrations suggests that his is running out.</p><p>Also notably absent was any clear sense of what North Korea would have to do to satisfy the United States. In his speech, Trump focused less on the regime’s nuclear weapons than on the nature of the regime itself. He told the story of Otto Warmbier, an American student arrested in North Korea who died shortly after his return to the United States. And he saluted Warmbier’s parents, who he had invited to watch the speech. This isn’t that unusual; telling the stories of individual Americans has become a State of the Union tradition. But then Trump did something more unfamiliar: He told the story of a non-American, a defector named Mr. Ji Seong Ho, who endured grotesque horrors in North Korea before making it to the South.</p><p>If Trump still aims to pressure Kim Jong Un into a nuclear deal, these stories are counterproductive. The North’s central rationale for developing nuclear weapons is to forestall the kind of regime change America brought about in Libya and Iraq. Trump—by emphasizing the depravity of the North Korean regime in his most high-profile speech of the year—thus strengthens Kim’s justification for never giving his nukes up.</p><p>But if Trump’s real aim was to rally public support for a military strike, the Warmbier and Ji stories serve a purpose. They rouse moral indignation. The Warmbier case even makes American military action seem like an act of self-defense. Kim’s regime brutalized a U.S. citizen. Now, as Trump told Warmbier’s parents, “we pledge to honor Otto’s memory with American resolve.”</p><p>As Trump was preparing to deliver his address, news broke that the White House was withdrawing the nomination of former Bush National Security Council official Victor Cha to be ambassador to South Korea. The <em>Financial Times</em> <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8670b33a-0608-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5">reported</a> that Cha had been “asked by [administration] officials whether he was prepared to help manage the evacuation of American citizens from South Korea —an operation known as non-combatant evacuation operations—that would almost certainly be implemented before any military strike.” Cha, the <em>Financial Times</em> reported, “had expressed his reservations about any kind of military strike.” These reservations apparently cost him his job.</p><p>Maybe the <em>FT</em> story is wrong. Maybe Trump isn’t as serious about a “bloody nose” military strike against Pyongyang as some <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/amid-signs-of-a-thaw-in-north-korea-tensions-bubble-up-1515427541">reports</a> suggest. But his State of the Union speech suggests, at the very least, that Congress should begin debating the risks of war. “North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear missiles could very soon threaten our homeland,” declared Trump on Tuesday night. So could Trump’s reckless pursuit of a military solution to a problem that has none. It’s up to Congress to try to stop it.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedPool / ReutersIs Trump Preparing for War With North Korea?2018-01-31T00:10:01-05:002018-01-31T09:35:17-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-551933The omissions in the State of the Union, and the fate of Victor Cha, all point in the same direction.<p dir="ltr">Since Donald Trump became president, pundits have wondered what it would take for the Republican establishment to stand up to him. Now we know.</p><p dir="ltr">On Thursday, <em>The New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html">reported</a> that White House Counsel Donald McGahn had threatened to resign if Donald Trump fired Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Some liberals—having spent the Obama years cursing McGahn for his efforts while at the Federal Election Commission to prevent it from enforcing campaign-finance law—responded with dark humor. Ian Millhiser, who writes for the liberal blog <em>Think Progress</em>, <a href="https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/956697772496965638">tweeted</a>, “Area man shocked to learn that Don McGahn has a soul.”</p><p dir="ltr">But whether or not McGahn has a soul, he has a reputation. More than perhaps anyone else in the Trump White House, he’s a longtime member, in good standing, of the Washington Republican establishment.</p><p dir="ltr">Once upon a time, that establishment was an insurgency. Before Ronald Reagan, the Washington establishment consisted largely of people, in both parties, who believed in the legitimacy of federal oversight of the economy. But as the Republican Party began moving right in the 1970s, it grew more and more influenced by what Sidney Blumenthal in 1986 called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Counter-Establishment-Conservative-Ascent-Political/dp/1402759118">the counter-establishment</a>”: a network of think tanks, publications, and business groups that sought to free capitalism from the government’s yoke. By the late 1990s, when McGahn joined this world—after Reagan had been president and Newt Gingrich had been speaker of the House—the adjective “counter” was no longer necessary. Anti-government forces wielded at least as much power in Washington as the pro-government forces that had preceded them.</p><p dir="ltr">McGahn’s service on the Federal Election Commission is a good example. The Commission, created in response to the Nixon campaign’s misdeeds in 1972, is designed to regulate the role of money in America’s elections. Washington’s bureaucratic establishment believes in that. But its Republican establishment does not. And so in 2008, Senator Mitch McConnell—the foremost foe of campaign-finance regulation in Congress—helped put McGahn on the FEC. McGahn was already well-known in GOP circles. He had <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122523208143177711">handled election law</a> for the Bush campaign in 2000 and for a decade <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/don-mcgahn-trump-white-house-counsel/">served as the lawyer</a> for the National Republican Congressional Committee. During his time at the FEC, one former Commission staffer told<em> <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/don-mcgahn-trump-white-house-counsel/">Mother Jones</a></em>, McGahn “seemed mostly interested in grinding its work to a halt.”</p><p dir="ltr">From there he went to work at Jones Day, a prestigious law firm long known for its conservative leanings. McGahn’s wife served for many years as <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/367654-treasury-aide-mcgahn-wife-of-white-house-counsel-to-leave-admin-for-hill">staff director of the House Financial Services Committee</a>. Which helps explain why, when McGahn went to work for the Trump campaign, a<em> </em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-own-beltway-establishment-guy-the-curious-journey-of-don-mcgahn/2016/04/11/856229a8-fb9a-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html?utm_term=.678be589f316"><em>Washington Post</em> profile</a> called him its “unofficial liaison to the Washington establishment.”</p><p dir="ltr">This makes McGahn more vulnerable than many in Trumpland to what that establishment thinks. When Steve Bannon left the White House, he went back to excoriating the Republican establishment at <em>Breitbart</em>. When Jared Kushner leaves, he’ll likely go back to New York real estate. When John Kelly leaves, he’ll presumably have as little do with civilians as possible. But McGahn will probably return to that most Beltway of legal specialties, campaign-finance law, in the Washington office of a major firm. Which means his reputation in Washington—albeit conservative Washington—matters. Even McGahn’s decision to work for Trump, reported the <a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2016/03/jones-day-helping-donald-trump-to-make-america-great-again/,">Above the Law</a> <a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2016/03/will-jones-day-drop-donald-trump-as-a-client/">blog</a> in 2016, sparked a near-rebellion amongst his colleagues at Jones Day. In the <em>Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/trumps-own-beltway-establishment-guy-the-curious-journey-of-don-mcgahn/2016/04/11/856229a8-fb9a-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html?utm_term=.678be589f316">profile</a>, a Republican operative wondered why McGahn would give “credibility to Trump in such a way that could damage his reputation for the long term?”</p><p dir="ltr">Imagine trying to return to Jones Day—or some equivalent firm—after firing Robert Mueller. In the words of Norm Eisen, President Obama’s former ethics czar, who has tussled with McGahn for many years, “He didn’t want that personal baggage. What’s he going to do for a living, go live in a frat house with Steve Bannon and Dr. Price and Sean Spicer and people that can’t get a job?”</p><p dir="ltr">McGahn may have genuinely believed firing Mueller was wrong. But people don’t always do the right thing because a small, still voice tells them to. Sometimes it’s the loud, collective voice of their community threatening them with excommunication.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s worth remembering that Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, who both resigned rather than obey Nixon’s order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, were both deeply ensconced in the Washington establishments of their day. Richardson had already served as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and under secretary of Defense. Ruckelshaus had been the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Both men’s careers in government preceded the Nixon administration. By contrast, the third in command in Nixon’s Justice Department, Robert Bork, was more of an outsider. He had spent his career outside Washington, in academia, and reportedly fired Cox, in significant measure, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/26/us/new-views-emerge-of-bork-s-role-in-watergate-dismissals.html?src=pm">because of his deep belief in the constitutionality of executive power</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s become commonplace to note that many establishment Republican politicians privately consider Trump unfit to be president but won’t challenge him publicly because he enjoys the support of their constituents. For McGahn, the calculation is different: The members of the Washington Republican establishment are his constituents. And they’ll be around long after Donald Trump is gone.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJonathan Ernst / Reuters The Establishment Strikes Back 2018-01-26T07:17:14-05:002018-01-26T09:40:38-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-551561Don McGahn’s refusal to carry out the president’s order to fire the special counsel shows that official Washington still holds some influence.<p>Government shutdowns are a useful window into what really matters to politicians. It’s one thing to say you care about an issue. It’s another to care about it enough to tell hundreds of thousands of federal employees to stay home, and to risk the political blowback that arises when their absence starts wreaking havoc on ordinary Americans’ lives. </p><p>So it’s noteworthy that, according to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/19/16905584/government-shutdown-history-clinton-obama-explained"><em>Vox</em></a><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/19/16905584/government-shutdown-history-clinton-obama-explained">’s Dylan Matthews</a>, the federal government has shut down because of disputes about domestic spending (1976, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1990, 1995, 1996, 2013), abortion (1977, 1979), military spending (1978, 1982, 1983), civil rights (1983, 1984), crime (1984), welfare (1986), foreign policy (1987), and because congressional leaders just plain forgot to pass legislation necessary to keep it open (1982). But until last weekend, it had never shut down because of a dispute over immigration.</p><p>It’s more evidence that immigration has become far more central to American politics than it was a generation ago. (Quick: try recalling Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush’s position on the issue). It’s also become far more polarizing. As recently as a decade ago, when they ran against each other for president, Barack Obama and John McCain mostly agreed on the subject.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>What explains this? Part of the answer is obvious: The United States contains a lot more immigrants. In 1960, when America was, presumably, great, the foreign-born <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/03/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ft_17-04-10_immigrant_share/">comprised</a> less than five percent of America’s population. Now they comprise more than 13 percent. Moreover, today’s immigrants are now mostly people of color. In the 1960s, when US immigration law strongly favored Europeans, the country that sent the most people to live in the United States was <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states">Italy</a>, followed by Germany and Canada. In 2015, more than a quarter of those who immigrated to the U.S. were from Mexico. So immigration is changing America’s racial and ethnic character.</p><p>But while this explains why immigration was likely to become a more important issue over time, it doesn’t explain its dramatic rise in political significance over the last few years. In recent years, according to the Pew Research Center, immigration has <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/03/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/">actually slowed</a>, and there are <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/25/as-mexican-share-declined-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-fell-in-2015-below-recession-level/">fewer undocumented immigrants</a> in the US than there were in 2009. So why now? One of the explanations is probably Barack Obama. The fact that the Democratic Party—which gets an increasing share of its votes from immigrants and people of color—elected the son of a visiting Kenyan college student as president probably elevated immigration’s political salience, and exacerbated the partisan divide surrounding it.</p><p>But there’s another factor, which often gets overlooked. Relative to the rest of the 21st century, this is a period of prosperity and peace. The deficit has dropped by <a href="https://www.thebalance.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306">almost two-thirds</a> since 2011. The unemployment rate has been <a href="http://www.multpl.com/unemployment/table">cut in half</a>. Wages for middle-class Americans are even <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/09/goldman-sachs-says-us-wages-will-really-start-to-rise-this-year.html">starting to rise</a>. Wartime casualties are down too. In 2010, 559 Americans died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last year, it was <a href="http://icasualties.org/">32</a>.</p><p>Why has this made immigration more central? Because politicians can afford to dwell on it. When the country is in recession and deficits are rising—as in the early 1990s and the late 2000s—debates over taxing and spending tend to dominate Washington. When large numbers of Americans are dying in war—as occurred in the mid-2000s—politicians focus on that. But when neither is taking place, and there’s more room for politicians to shape the conversation, questions of American identity often come to the fore.</p><p>This political moment doesn’t feel like the late 1990s. It feels unprecedented because America’s president is Donald Trump. But there are similarities. It was in the late 1990s, after the Cold War, after the Gulf War, and after America emerged from recession, that the Republican Party launched an effort to impeach Bill Clinton that centered, in large measure, on expelling the moral toxins that the 1960s had supposedly injected into American life. It’s not entirely coincidental that the #MeToo movement has sparked a reconsideration of the Clinton impeachment now, at another moment when debates over war and deficits have died down.</p><p>Trump—with his allies at Fox News, <em>Breitbart </em>and elsewhere—has taken advantage of this relative political vacuum to focus on immigration. So have his progressive opponents. Right now, it’s what politicians in both parties truly care about. And that may well remain the case until a stock-market crash, a recession, or another war—at least one of which, history suggests, is likely in Trump’s first term.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedEvan Vucci / APPresident Trump speaks during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in White House on January 9, 2018.Why America Is Fighting About Immigration 2018-01-26T06:00:00-05:002018-01-26T11:28:37-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-551537Relative peace and prosperity cause issues of identity to rise to the fore.<p>On Wednesday in <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-time-we-will-not-be-silent-on-iran/2018/01/03/d1cfc34e-f0cc-11e7-97bf-bba379b809ab_story.html?utm_term=.cd8243719ef2">The Washington Post</a></em>, Vice President Mike Pence contrasted his boss’s response to protests in Iran to President Obama’s response in 2009. Obama, he said, had “stayed silent” and “declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship.” But “under President Trump,” Pence crowed, “the United States is standing with them.”</p><p>This is a lie. Obama did not “stay silent.” He <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/01/politics/trump-obama-iran-protests/index.html">declared</a> himself “appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments” of Iranian protesters. His administration also <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-election-twitter-usa/u-s-state-department-speaks-to-twitter-over-iran-idUSWBT01137420090616">leaned on Twitter</a> to ensure that Iranians could continue using it to organize their demonstrations. Obama did, however, temper his public comments, so as “to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” Given its history, Obama <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/01/politics/trump-obama-iran-protests/index.html">argued</a>, if the U.S. were “seen as meddling,” it could harm the protesters’ cause.</p><p>Trump, by contrast, as is his nature, has put himself center stage. <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/947810806430826496">Three</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948164289591902208">times</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948548807612084224">since</a> the beginning of the year, he’s tweeted his condemnation of the government in Tehran and his support for the people demonstrating against it. And overwhelmingly, conservatives—even those who dislike Trump—have declared his approach superior. Which is odd. Because it is conservatives, of all people, who should recognize its risks.</p><p>They should recognize its risks for two reasons. First, because American conservatives have spent the last half-century warning that virtuous rhetoric, and even virtuous intentions, do not necessarily produce virtuous results. Think about the right’s critique of government intervention to alleviate poverty. It’s built on the contention that while liberals may denounce poverty more passionately than do conservatives, their policies, even when well-intentioned, actually hurt the poor. Why? Because human behavior is too complex for government planners to understand, so when they try to make people zig, people often zag instead. Irving Kristol, among the most influential conservative intellectuals of the 20th century, declared in 1972 that, “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”</p><p>Kristol’s journal, <em>The Public Interest</em>, focused mostly on domestic policy. But later in that decade, Jeane Kirkpatrick employed the same logic to critique Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. Carter, she acknowledged in her famous essay “<a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/dictatorships-double-standards/">Dictatorships and Double Standards</a>,” was genuinely “repelled by frankly non-democratic rulers.” But in his efforts to engineer a democratic transfer of power in Nicaragua and Iran, he ended up ushering in more brutal dictatorships instead. “History,” she lectured, “is a better guide than good intentions.”</p><p>None of this means Trump’s high-profile approach to the Iranian protests is necessarily wrong. Conservatives don’t believe that government actions always backfire. But it is odd to hear a conservative like Pence speak as if government intentions inherently bring about their desired result, that because Trump is embracing the protesters more loudly than Obama did, he’s necessarily doing a better job of advancing their cause.</p><p>It’s particularly odd because American policy toward Iran is exactly the kind of situation most likely to produce unintended consequences. If translating intentions into results is difficult domestically, it’s even harder overseas, especially in a country like Iran—from which the United States has been largely isolated since 1979—and whose domestic political dynamics American officials only dimly understand.</p><p>In fact, American policy in the Middle East since September 11 has been a festival of unintended consequences—measured mostly in innocent lives lost. In addition, America’s war in Afghanistan, which was expected to highlight American power, has helped China deepen its economic influence in Central Asia. America’s war in Iraq, which was expected to vanquish terrorism and weaken Iran, helped create ISIS and extend Tehran’s power. The “war on terror,” which was designed to prevent terrorism from the world’s ungoverned spaces, has instead ended up creating more: from Iraq to Libya to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/libyas-unintended-consequences.html">Mali</a>.</p><p>One reason for these unintended consequences is nationalism. People in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have not behaved as the United States hoped they would, in part, because many Afghans, Iraqis, and Libyans—despite loathing their anti-American leaders—also deeply distrusted the United States. That’s likely also the case in Iran. Pence may believe, as he claimed in his op-ed, that the United States “has long stood with those who yearn for freedom.” But most Iranians don’t. In 1953, after all, the United States helped overthrow a democratically elected Iranian leader and then spent the next several decades propping up Iran’s repressive shah. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein in a war in which he gassed Iranians. And it has still <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/15/four-good-reasons-why-iran-doesnt-trust-america/">never apologized</a> for accidentally downing an Iranian passenger jet in 1988, and killing 274 people. The United States is also largely responsible for the economic sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, and which, according to polls, they <a href="https://lobelog.com/poll-iranian-public-opinion-on-nukes-the-u-s-politics/">bitterly resent</a>.</p><p>Trump has added to this ugly record by banning Iranians from entering the United States and repeatedly denigrating Muslims and Islam. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that according to a 2016 survey by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies, 87 percent of Iranians held a negative view of the United States government. And that by a margin of three to one, according to a <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52750dd3e4b08c252c723404/t/5a1b10689140b7c306258b2e/1511723112971/SBY2017+Final.pdf">Zogby Research Services poll</a> taken last summer, Iranians think Trump has made U.S.-Iranian relations worse.</p><p>Given these conditions, it’s quite plausible to fear—as Obama did—that heavy-handed American intervention could provoke a nationalist backlash that helps Iran’s regime perpetuate its repressive ways. Conservatives should understand this because they, more than liberals, grasp nationalism’s appeal. To the extent Trumpism means anything, it means the celebration and exploitation of American nationalism against a series of adversaries—immigrants, trade deals, the UN, disloyal minorities, globalist elites—who supposedly threaten the sovereignty and integrity of the United States. Trump celebrates that kind of nationalism in Europe too. Thus, his supporters, of all people, should understand that Iranians value their sovereignty too, and are unlikely to welcome American interference, no matter how badly they want their regime overthrown.</p><p>Why can’t Pence understand that? I suspect a lot of it has to do with Ronald Reagan. Reagan, according to conservative legend, denounced the USSR—calling it an evil empire and demanding that it tear down the Berlin Wall—and thus helped inspire the revolts that brought down the Soviet empire. Pence wants to do something similar in Iran. But it’s a poor analogy. Eastern European countries like Poland were suffering under Soviet domination, and had little history of being dominated by the United States. Thus, Reagan was able to help stoke a Polish nationalism that expressed itself largely against Moscow. Iranians, by contrast, are rising up against homegrown dictators who use the specter of American domination to justify their hold on power. Iranians are thus less like Poles in the 1980s than Nicaraguans in the 1980s, who distrusted Reagan’s denunciations of their repressive Sandinista government because of their long, ugly experience with American power.</p><p>It’s ironic that Pence, in his oped, called Iranians “proud.” It’s precisely because they are proud—because, like Americans, they desire both individual freedom and national self-determination—that they can reject Ayatollah Khamenei while also rejecting Donald Trump.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedAPAmerican Conservatives Are Contradicting Themselves on Iran2018-01-04T18:10:03-05:002018-01-04T18:21:05-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2018:50-549764Where’s the habitual concern for unintended consequences?<p>If you oppose Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy, take heart. Apparently, he does too.</p><p>Fifteen minutes into his <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-trumps-full-speech-outlining-his-national-security-strategy">speech</a> unveiling the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf">strategy</a> on Tuesday, Trump butchered it in a revealing way. In its fourth paragraph, the strategy declares that the Trump administration will pursue a “strategy of <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf">principled realism</a>.” But Trump mangled the phrase, declaring instead that, “Our new strategy is based on a principle, realism.”</p><p>Although likely unintentional, Trump’s goof was telling. “Principled realism” probably appeals to Trump’s establishment-minded foreign-policy advisers because it adds a moral patina to America First. That ethical gloss is necessary because one of the National Security Strategy’s main themes is that Trump—unlike his predecessors—recognizes that the United States faces a new era of great-power rivalry with Russia and China. It paints this looming competition in intensely moralistic terms. America’s battles with China and Russia, the strategy announces, are “contests between those who value human dignity and freedom and those who oppress individuals and enforce uniformity.” Thus the importance of the adjective “principled.” It suggests that Trump’s sovereignty-obsessed nationalism—unlike the versions peddled by Moscow and Beijing—aims to create not simply a richer America, but a freer world.</p><p>This depiction of a globe divided along ideological lines—between white-hatted American democrats and black-hatted Russian and Chinese authoritarians—sounds more like John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Marco Rubio than Donald Trump. Which may be why Trump largely abandoned it in his speech. </p><p>The National Security Strategy declares that, “The United States distinguishes between economic competition with countries that follow fair and free market principles and competition with those that act with little regard for those principles.” In other words, mercantilist regimes like China’s rip America off, not rule-of-law-respecting ones like Japan, South Korea, and Germany. But in his speech, Trump ignored that distinction. He declared that “leaders in Washington negotiated disastrous trade deals” and “failed to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense.” As during the campaign, he described a world not of benign democratic allies and menacing authoritarian adversaries but a world in which every major government—irrespective of political system—screws the United States.</p><p>While insisting that America’s NATO allies pay more for their defense, the National Security Strategy urged American and European unity against the common threat from Moscow. “Russia,” it declared, “is using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments.” To combat that, “The United States and Europe will work together to counter Russian subversion and aggression,” including by reaffirming that “the United States remains committed to Article V of the Washington Treaty,” which obligates America to defend its NATO allies.</p><p>Trump’s discussion of NATO, by contrast, omitted any reference to a Russian threat and focused exclusively on the threat posed by America’s deadbeat allies. “I would not allow member states to be delinquent in the payment while we guarantee their safety and are willing to fight wars for them,” he boasted. “We have made clear that countries that are immensely wealthy should reimburse the United States for the cost of defending them. This is a major departure from the past, but a fair and necessary one: necessary for our country, necessary for our taxpayer, necessary for our own thought process.” Unlike the National Security Strategy, Trump said nothing in his speech about America’s obligation under Article 5.</p><p>Later, Trump did acknowledge that, “We also face rival powers, Russia and China, that seek to challenge American influence, values, and wealth.” But he then declared that, “We will attempt to build a great partnership” with them—hardly the language of someone girding for a new cold war. And he cited America’s assistance in foiling a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg as an example of how that partnership might work.</p><p>Rather than showcasing his National Security Strategy’s central theme, Trump’s speech buried it. National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster may want Trump to rally the free world against the tyrants in Moscow and Beijing, but Trump likes strongmen and he likes flattery, and thus, he likes Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. For him, the important global schisms are not ideological but civilizational, national, and personal: The West versus Islam, America versus the countries that swindle it, and above all, Trump versus those who doubt his greatness. McMaster may consider himself a realist when it comes to global affairs but he could use a bit more realism about his boss.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / ReutersTrump Doesn't Seem to Buy His Own National Security Strategy2017-12-19T08:04:38-05:002017-12-19T11:05:30-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-548741The notion of “principled realism” may please foreign-policy advisers, but it’s not clear the president knows what it is.<p>Amidst the exhilaration of Roy Moore’s defeat, and the broader cultural revolution sparked by women’s willingness to expose the sexual misdeeds of powerful men, it’s worth remembering this: Ninety percent of Republican women in Alabama, according to <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/election/2017/results/alabama-senate">exit polls</a>, cast their ballots for a man credibly accused of pedophilia. That’s a mere two points less than Republican men. By contrast, Democratic men voted for Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones, at the same rate as Democratic women: 98 percent. In early December, <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/12/02/National-Politics/Polling/question_19648.xml?uuid=dl6-GtdfEeea2coGGe36BQ">The Washington Post</a> </em>and the Schar School at George Mason University asked Alabamians whether they believed the allegations against Moore.</p><p>At my request, researchers from the Schar School broke down the answers by party and gender. The results: Party mattered far more. Republican women in Alabama were only four points more likely than Republican men to believe Moore’s accusers. In fact, Republican women were 40 points less likely to believe Moore’s accusers than were Democratic men. All of which points to a truth insufficiently appreciated in this moment of sexual and political upheaval: It’s not gender that increasingly divides the two parties. It is feminism.</p><p>This September, Leonie Huddy and Johanna Willmann of Stony Brook University presented a paper at the American Political Science Association. (The paper is not yet published, but Huddy sent me a copy.) In it, they charted the effects of feminism on partisanship over time. Holding other factors constant, they found that between 2004 and 2016, support for feminism—belief in the existence of “societal discrimination against women, and the need for greater female political power”—grew increasingly correlated with support for the Democratic Party. The correlation rose earlier among feminist women, but by 2016, it had also risen among feminist men. A key factor, the authors speculated, was Hillary Clinton. A liberal woman’s emergence as a serious presidential contender in 2008, and then as her party’s nominee eight years later, drove feminists of both genders toward the Democratic Party and anti-feminists of both genders toward the GOP.</p><p>In other words, Clinton, along with Donald Trump, has done for gender what Barack Obama did for race. Obama’s election, UCLA political scientist Michael Tesler has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/21/how-racially-resentful-working-class-whites-fled-the-democratic-party-before-donald-trump/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.aed46dae3456">argued</a>, pushed whites who exhibited more racial resentment into the Republican Party and whites who exhibited less into the Democratic Party. Something similar is now happening around gender. But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Amidst the current crescendo of sexual-harassment allegations, this is easy to miss. That’s because, in actual cases of sexual harassment, gender identity is obviously crucial. Overwhelmingly, the harassers are men and the victims are women. Gender attitudes—political beliefs about women’s place in society at large—often matter less. Men who support a feminist political agenda, like Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein, still assault women. Women who oppose a feminist agenda still get assaulted.</p><p>But when it comes to the political reaction to sexual harassment, gender identity matters less and gender attitudes matter more. “A sizable minority of American women,” note Huddy and Willmann, “do not believe in the existence of gender discrimination, think that women who charge men with gender discrimination are trouble makers, and are inclined to side with a man accused of discriminatory behavior.” And Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy seems to have made these women more staunchly Republican.</p><p>Which helps explain why female Republicans express far less support for feminism than even male Democrats. Earlier this month, the research firm <a href="25%20points%20more%20likely%20than%20Republican%20women">PerryUndem</a> found that Democratic men were 25 points more likely than Republican women to say sexism remains a “big” or “somewhat” big problem. According to October polling data sorted for me by the Pew Research Center, Democratic men were 31 points more likely than Republican women to say the “country has not gone far enough on women’s rights.” In both surveys, the gender gap within parties was small: Republican women and Republican men answered roughly the same way as did Democratic women and Democratic men. But the gap between parties—between both Democratic men and women and Republican men and women—was large.</p><p>Since Trump’s election and the recent wave of sexual-harassment allegations, this partisan divide appears to have grown. In January, when PerryUndem asked whether “most women interpret innocent remarks as being sexist,” Republican women were 11 points more likely than Democratic men to say yes. When PerryUndem asked the question again this month, the gap had more than doubled to 23 points. A year ago, Democratic men were 30 points more likely than Republican women to strongly agree that “the country would be better off if we had more women in political office.” The gap is now 45 points.</p><p>Over the decades, a similar divergence has occurred in Congress. Syracuse University’s Danielle Thompson <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Opting-Out-Congress-Polarization-Candidates/dp/1107183677">notes</a> that, in the 1980s, “little difference existed between Republican and Democratic women [members of Congress] in their advocacy of women’s rights.” In the 1990s, Republican women members were still noticeably more moderate than their male GOP colleagues. That created a significant degree of ideological affinity between women politicians across the aisle. Now it’s gone. There are many more Democratic than Republican women in Congress. But, Thompson’s research shows, the Republican women are today just as conservative as their male GOP colleagues.</p><p>Why does this matter? First, it clarifies why Democrats forced Al Franken to vacate his Senate seat but Republicans didn’t force Roy Moore from his Senate race. Republicans of both genders are simply far more likely than Democrats of both genders to believe that women cry sexism in response to “<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/366406592/PerryUndem-Report-on-Sexism-Harassment-Culture-And-Equality-compressed#download">innocent remarks or acts</a>” and that America has “<a href="http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/10/20144616/Gender-Equality-Report-FINAL-10.18.pdf">gone far enough on women’s rights</a>.” It’s not surprising, therefore, that Democratic women senators took the lead in demanding that Franken go while Republican women senators reacted to Moore <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/12/politics/republicans-roy-moore/index.html">pretty much</a> like their male colleagues.</p><p>Secondly, this partisan divergence hints at the nature of the backlash that the current sexual-harassment reckoning will spark: Anti-feminist women will help to lead it. In part, that’s because anti-feminist women can’t be labelled sexist as easily as anti-feminist men. But it’s also because, given their conservative attitudes, many Republican women likely find the current disruption of gender relations unnerving.</p><p>Feminist theorists have long sought to explain this. In a recent <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/roy-moore-s-white-female-voters-are-part-long-history-ncna827976">essay</a>, Marcie Bianco of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University cited Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women are more likely than other oppressed groups to defend the hierarchies that subjugate them. Women, de Beauvoir wrote, have “no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. … They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women.” In her 1983 book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Right-Wing-Women-Andrea-Dworkin/dp/0399506713">Right-Wing Women</a></em>, Andrea Dworkin argued that female anti-feminism was an understandable, if tragic, strategy of self-protection. “A woman,” she wrote, “acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms in order to be as safe as she can be.”</p><p>Anti-feminists, needless to say, explain their views differently. “It’s difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly is very pro-abortion,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/02/23/kellyanne-conway-feminism-associated-with-being-anti-male-and-pro-abortion/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.cf5f550b8508">declared</a> Kellyanne Conway in February. “I look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances.” Conway’s point about abortion may be particularly significant in explaining female anti-feminism. According to a <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/07/on-abortion-persistent-divides-between-and-within-the-two-parties-2/">July Pew study</a>, 38 percent of American women believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, only four points lower than American men.</p><p>All of which underscores a key difference between the current upheaval over gender and the ongoing upheaval over race. Many more women than African Americans are invested in maintaining an unequal status quo. In the growing partisan polarization over women’s rights, women will likely play prominent roles on both sides. The last great era of feminist activism helped to produce not only Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, but also Phyllis Schlafly. And the #metoo movement will probably produce Schlafly’s of its own.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJohn Minchillo / APProtesters hold up signs at the Women's March on Washington on January 21, 2017.The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism2017-12-15T08:03:02-05:002017-12-15T11:06:06-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-548423Democratic men are 31 points more likely to say that the “country has not gone far enough on women’s rights” than Republican women.<p>For Donald Trump, Muslim barbarism is a political strategy. It inspires the fear and hatred that binds him to his base. Muslim barbarism is so politically useful, in fact, that, when necessary, Trump creates it. </p><p>During the presidential campaign, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.215e72dea3b1">invented</a> mobs of Jersey City Muslims who had celebrated 9/11. After the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, he <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/salvadorhernandez/trump-falsely-claims-muslims-knew-in-advance-of-san-bernardi?utm_term=.fgJZjawJW#.ffvxebw0J">invented</a> a conspiracy in which “many, many people, Muslims living with them, in the same area” had been in on Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s plot. This February, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/world/europe/last-night-in-sweden-trumps-remark-baffles-a-nation.html?_r=0">invented</a> a terrorist attack in Sweden, which he blamed on the fact that Sweden “took in large numbers” of you-know-whos. Just last week, he <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/nov/29/donald-trump-retweets-anti-muslim-videos-far-right/">invented</a> a Muslim migrant’s attack on a crippled Dutch boy.</p><p>But on Wednesday, Trump outdid himself. By announcing that America recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he didn’t just invent Muslim violence. He provoked it.</p><p>The U.S. consulate in Jerusalem is <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-warns-americans-about-travel-to-jerusalems-old-city-and-west-bank-1512509359">warning</a> Americans to avoid Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank. The State Department is <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/04/trump-israel-jerusalem-violence-279735">warning</a> of violence at U.S. embassies. The violence may not come right away. As Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/jerusalem-embassy-capital-trump/547592/?utm_source=feed">told</a> my colleague Emma Green, it’s usually “the real or perceived threat to sacred space”—especially the Temple Mount, which contains the Al Aqsa mosque—that triggers immediate bloodshed.</p><p>But over the longer term, Trump’s decision increases the odds of violence because it deepens Palestinian despair. “The fading hopes for a real change in the situation,” Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/138007/yuval-diskin-two-state-solution">wrote</a> in 2013, “is also the reason why, at the end of the day, the Palestinians will take to the streets, leading to another round of bloody violence.” Herzl Halevi, Chief of Military Intelligence for the Israel Defense Forces, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.683860">has made</a> a similar point more recently.</p><p>Why will Trump’s move deepen Palestinian despair? Consider the context. Were there a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem—or were concrete steps underway to create one—declaring American recognition for Israeli sovereignty in West Jerusalem would be less incendiary. But Trump, unlike his three predecessors, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/trump-netanyahu-israel-palestine/516873/?utm_source=feed">has not said</a> he supports the creation of a Palestinian state. And since Trump took over, Benjamin Netanyahu has <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/15/netanyahu-trump-meeting-no-daylight-two-state-solution/97937580/">stopped</a> <a href="https://forward.com/news/national/383096/trump-and-netanyahu-strain-to-avoid-even-mentioning-two-state-solution/">pretending</a> that he supports one either. (He <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.650057">never really did</a>.) Meanwhile, on the ground, roughly 100,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem live <a href="https://972mag.com/jerusalem-by-the-numbers-poverty-segregation-and-discrimination/91425/">beyond</a> Israel’s separation barrier, largely <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.792699">cut off from city services</a>. Israel regularly <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/08/israel-jerusalem-palestinians-stripped-status">revokes</a> the rights of Palestinians to live in the city. And it has <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.810994">accelerated</a> the construction of Jewish housing in East Jerusalem, making a Palestinian capital there less and less likely.</p><p>In this context, Trump’s announcement will only further convince Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—most of whom lack citizenship in the state that controls their lives—that Israel and America are dedicated to perpetuating their lack of basic rights. And that hopelessness makes violence more likely. As Ali Jida, a Palestinian activist in Jerusalem, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.827175">told</a> <em>Haaretz</em>, “It isn’t just Trump’s position. It’s a buildup of all sorts of things—the Israeli soldiers’ behavior, humiliations. There’s going to be an explosion and it will center on Jerusalem.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Trump’s action doesn’t justify Palestinian violence. Palestinian leaders have a responsibility to try to channel their people’s frustration into mass protest and civil disobedience (which, sadly, often gets <a href="https://972mag.com/why-the-world-missed-a-week-of-palestinian-civil-disobedience/128886/">less media coverage</a>) rather than armed attacks, something Yasser Arafat failed to do at the start of the Second Intifada. But American presidents also have a responsibility not to create the conditions for further bloodshed. When it came to American recognition of Jerusalem, Trump’s predecessors—even pro-Israel hawks like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush—understood that. He does not.</p><p>Why not? Ignorance may play a role. Trump’s core Israel-Palestine team—Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman—lacks any actual expertise or familiarity with the Arab world. Politics likely plays a role too. At the Zionist Organization of America gala last month, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former consigliere stressed the influence of big Republican donor and major Israel supporter Sheldon Adelson. After the release of the <em>Access Hollywood</em> tape, in which Trump gloated about his exploits with women<strong>,</strong> Bannon <a href="https://forward.com/opinion/387527/zoa-rolled-out-the-red-carpet-for-steve-bannon-and-it-backfired/">declared</a> that “most of the establishment of Republicans” abandoned him. But “Sheldon Adelson had Donald Trump’s back. Sheldon Adelson offered guidance and counsel and wisdom about how to get through it. He was there for Donald Trump about how to comport himself and how to dig down deep. And it was his guidance and his wisdom that helped get us through.” Adelson also offered money: $35 million to help elect Trump and <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/news/329462-casino-magnate-gave-5-million-to-trumps-inauguration">another $5 million</a> for his inaugural bash. And he has been <a href="https://972mag.com/is-sheldon-adelson-behind-trumps-decision-on-jerusalem/131218/">pushing</a> hard for the Jerusalem move. Another factor contributing to the decision may be the near-irrelevance of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who may well be too weak to forcefully convey to his boss the global opposition to the Jerusalem move.</p><p>Beyond all this, however, lies Trump’s relationship with Muslim violence. I doubt Trump sees himself as inciting it. More likely, he considers it to be pervasive, culturally ingrained, and inevitable no matter what America does. George W. Bush, for all his sins, at least acknowledged that U.S. foreign policy, by propping up Middle Eastern dictators, might have contributed to jihadist terrorism. Trump, by contrast, seems never to have contemplated the possibility that jihadist terrorism stems from any cause other than the inherent pathologies of Islam. He did, after all, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/index.html">declare</a> last year that “Islam”—not just Muslims, but Islam itself—“hates us.”</p><p>Religious conflicts, like racial and ethnic ones, are critical to Trump’s appeal. He needs Mexican-Americans to rape and murder white girls. He needs African-American athletes to “disrespect the flag.” And he needs Muslims to explode bombs and burn American flags. The more threatening non-white, non-Christians appear, both at home and abroad, the more his supporters rely on him to keep the barbarians down and out. If Trump has to invent these dangers, he will. In the case of Jerusalem, however, he can go further: He can help create them.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedMohammed Salem / ReutersPalestinian women shout slogans during a protest in Gaza City on December 6, 2017. Trump's Jerusalem Plan Is a Deadly Provocation2017-12-06T13:40:20-05:002017-12-08T16:03:33-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547652The decision to recognize the city as Israel's capital increases the odds of violence because it deepens Palestinian despair.<p>Now that Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and agreed to dish on his former boss, some Trump-watchers are suggesting that impeachment may be around the corner. “It’s time to start talking about impeachment,” announced a Saturday <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/opinions/its-time-to-start-talking-about-impeachment-louis/index.html">column</a> on CNN.com. The Flynn deal, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/michael-flynn-guilty-plea-takeaways.html?_r=0">declared</a> former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman in Friday’s <em>New York Times</em>, “portends the likelihood of impeachable charges being brought against the president of the United States.”</p><p>That may be true. But bringing impeachment charges against Trump, and actually forcing him from office, are two vastly different things. And while the former may be more likely today than it was half a year ago, the latter is actually less likely. Since Robert Mueller became special counsel in May, the chances of the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment—and the Senate ratifying them—have probably gone down.</p><p>That’s because impeachment is less a legal process than a political one. Passing articles of impeachment requires a majority of the House. Were such a vote held today—even if every Democrat voted yes—it would still require <a href="https://pressgallery.house.gov/member-data/party-breakdown">22 Republicans</a>. If Democrats take the House next fall, they could then pass articles of impeachment on their own. But ratifying those articles would require two-thirds of the Senate, which would probably require at least 15 Republican votes.</p><p>That kind of mass Republican defection has grown harder, not easier, to imagine. It’s grown harder because the last six months have demonstrated that GOP voters will stick with Trump despite his lunacy, and punish those Republican politicians who do not.</p><p>Among Republicans, Trump’s approval rating has held remarkably steady. The week Mueller was named, according to <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx">Gallup</a>, Trump’s GOP support stood at 84 percent. In the days after Donald Trump Jr. was revealed to have written, “I love it” in response to a Russian offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton, it reached 87 percent. In Gallup’s last poll, taken in late November, it was 81 percent. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans has not dipped below 79 percent since he took office. None of the revelations from Mueller’s investigation—nor any of the other outrageous things Trump has done—has significantly undermined his support among the GOP rank and file.</p><p>The GOP senators who have challenged Trump, by contrast, have seen their support among Republican voters crash. In July, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s brave and honorable book was excerpted in <em>Politico</em> as “<a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/31/my-party-is-in-denial-about-donald-trump-215442">My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump</a>.” Trump retaliated, of course. And by October, a <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pollster-arizona-doesnt-like-flake-just-30-approve/article/2638551">Morning Consult poll</a> found that Arizona Republicans disapproved of Flake by 13 points. That month, he declined to run for reelection. The other GOP senator to most frontally challenge Trump has been Tennessee’s Bob Corker, who in a series of interviews in October, accused him of “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/24/politics/corker-trump-photo-op-tax-plan/index.html">debasing</a>” the presidency and warned that he could lead America into <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/us/politics/trump-corker.html">World War III</a>. The result: A similar collapse of support. As <em>The Washington Post</em>’s Aaron Blake has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/10/27/bob-corkers-poll-numbers-just-plunged-among-republicans-amid-his-trump-feud/?utm_term=.0f49c98b2695">noted</a>, Tennessee Republicans approved of Corker in February by 40 points. By the end of October, they disapproved of him by 12 points. Not surprisingly, Corker isn’t running for reelection either.</p><p>Could Mueller or some enterprising journalist uncover revelations so epic that they shake Trump’s hold on the GOP, and give Republican senators cover to support his removal? It’s unlikely. After all, the <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/16/roy-moore-doug-jones-alabama-poll-245558">vast majority</a> of Alabama Republicans still support Roy Moore. Most conservatives consume pro-Trump media, which will downplay or distort virtually anything Mueller or the mainstream press discovers. And the more aggressively Democrats push for Trump’s removal, the easier it will be for <em>Breitbart</em> and Sean Hannity to rally Republicans against a “left-wing coup.”</p><p>Democrats did something similar during the battle over Bill Clinton’s impeachment. By September 1998, more than 100 newspapers—including <em>USA Today</em>, the <em>Chicago Tribune</em> and the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em>—had <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/18/us/testing-president-media-resign-not-resign-question-that-weighs-editorial-writers.html">called on him to step down</a>. That month, CNN <a href="https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1998/09/17/democrats.clinton/">reported</a> that Democratic “lawmakers are privately telling top White House aides that the president should consider resigning.”</p><p>But Clinton survived, largely because Democratic voters stuck by him. If anything, the Republican-led impeachment effort boosted his popularity among his party’s base. When <em>Newsweek</em> first broke the news of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky in January 1998, <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/116584/presidential-approval-ratings-bill-clinton.aspx">according to Gallup</a>, his approval rating among Democrats was 86 percent. After he admitted to lying about the affair in August, it hit 89 percent. By the time the Senate voted on impeachment in February 1999, it hit 91 percent.</p><p>The last decade has shown that you can get big things through Congress with the support of only one party. In 2009, Democrats passed a stimulus bill and Obamacare with no help from the GOP. Last week on tax cuts, Republicans did the reverse. But removing a president requires bipartisanship. And in this ultra-partisan age, that means removing a president is virtually impossible, even when he’s Donald Trump.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / ReutersThe Odds of Impeachment Are Dropping2017-12-03T08:20:19-05:002017-12-04T09:12:04-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547358Despite Robert Mueller’s damaging disclosures, Republican voters offer Trump unwavering support.<p>When the President of the United States <a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935609305574903812">retweets</a> crude anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/the-ultra-nationalist-british-party-trump-raised-out-of-obscurity/547016/?utm_source=feed">neo-fascist</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/03/deputy-leader-britain-first-guilty-over-verbal-abuse-muslim-woman-jayda-fransen-hijab">convicted</a> for harassing Muslims on the street, it’s useful to have a secretary of state with a different point of view. And Rex Tillerson, for all his faults, does. Tillerson has <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/22/trumps-views-islam-continue-evolve-secretary-state-rex-tillerson-says/102004578/">declared</a> that, “there’s a great deal that’s misunderstood about the Muslim world” and that “we need to put a lot more effort into understanding one another better.” He’s even ventured that “the president's views” about Islam, perhaps with a nudge from him, “are going to continue to evolve."</p><p>But they’re less likely to “evolve”—or be mitigated in any way—if Trump enacts the plan <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/us/politics/state-department-tillerson-pompeo-trump.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=first-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;_r=0">describes</a>, in which Tillerson is replaced early next year by CIA Director Mike Pompeo. That’s because Pompeo embraces anti-Muslim bigots, and defames Muslims, with almost as much gusto as Trump himself.</p><p>Among Fransen’s closest American analogues are Brigitte Gabriel and Frank Gaffney. Gabriel, who has <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/maher-season-premiere-inc_b_168972.html">said</a> a “practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America,” runs ACT for America, an organization that <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/act-america">scours textbooks</a> in an effort to eliminate references that equate Islam with Judaism and Christianity, and urges its members to <a href="https://actforamericahouston.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/whats-wrong-with-halal-food/">protest the sale of halal food</a>. In 2016, Pompeo won ACT’s “<a href="http://www.actforamerica.org/bgeoy">highest honor</a>,” the National Security Eagle Award. Gabriel has called him a “<a href="ttp://www.actforamerica.org/bgeoy">steadfast ally</a>.”</p><p>Pompeo is also a steadfast ally of Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, who has <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gaffney-wants-muslims-practicing-sharia-prosecuted-for-sedition/">argued</a> that adherence to Islamic law—far from being protected by the First Amendment—should be considered “an impermissible act of sedition, which has to be prosecuted.” Pompeo spoke at the Center for Security Policy’s <a href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2015/02/10/watch-live-defeat-jihad-summit/">“Defeat Jihad” summit</a> in 2015. And as a member of Congress, he appeared on Gaffney’s radio show <a href="https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/tag/mike-pompeo/page/2/">over 20 times</a>.</p><p>Listen to Pompeo and you hear echoes of Fransen, Gaffney, and Gabriel’s worldview. Like Gaffney and Gabriel, Pompeo repeatedly insinuated that President Obama preferred Islam—and maybe even ISIS—to Christianity and the United States. In a February 2015 interview, Gaffney <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-rep-agrees-with-frank-gaffney-that-obama-has-affinity-for-terrorists-muslim-congressman-could-be-national-security-risk/">asked</a> Pompeo whether Obama has “kind of an affinity for, if not the violent beheading and crucifixions and slaying of Christians and all that, but at least for the cause for which these guys are engaged in such activities.” Pompeo’s response: “Frank, every place you stare at the president’s policies and statements, you see what you just described.” That December, a questioner—after accusing Obama of supporting Islamists in Egypt and Iran—<a href="http://www.westminster-institute.org/events/pompeo/">told</a> Pompeo, “I can’t think of anything where he’s been on our side.” Pompeo’s answer: “The data you point out is correct and I’m not afraid to talk about the data. The data is very clear. Every time there has been a conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic East the data points all point to a single direction”—to Obama’s disloyalty to Christianity and the United States.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>It’s not just Obama. Pompeo has depicted American Muslims as a whole as a fifth column. Two months after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, he went on the House floor to declare that the “silence of Muslim leaders has been deafening.” This “silence,” Pompeo <a href="https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/cia-dir-pompeo-silence-boston-marathon-bombing-islamic-leaders-us">declared</a>, “has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts” of terrorism. And it “casts doubt upon the commitment to peace among adherents of the Muslim faith.”</p><p>In fact, as <em>Huffington Post</em> <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/anai-rhoads/muslim-groups-pompeo_b_3431339.html">noted</a>, the Boston bombing had occurred at roughly 2:49 p.m. on April 15: “The Universal Muslim Association of America spoke out against the attacks at 5:17 p.m.; the Muslim Public Affairs Council at 5:53 p.m.; the Council on American-Islamic Relations 7:46 p.m.; the Muslim Peace Coalition 8 p.m. and the Muslim American Society Public Affairs and Engagement 10:52 p.m.;” and “the Islamic Society of North America” at 12:09 a.m. That’s the silence that Pompeo considered so “deafening” that it cast doubt on whether “adherents of the Muslim faith” believe in peace.</p><p>Underlying Pompeo’s remarks was the insinuation that Muslims must prove their loyalty to the Christians who have permitted them to reside in the United States. He made that point more explicitly three years later after the Islamic Society of Wichita, which sits in Pompeo’s former district, invited a sheikh named Monzer Talib to speak. Pompeo, <a href="https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2016/04/04/rep-mike-pompeo-sits-down-with-sfr/">with help from the Center for Security Policy</a>, publicly called Talib a supporter of terrorism. (The Islamic Society’s spokesman called that “<a href="http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article69548302.html#storylink=cpy">completely untrue</a>.”) And in the face of reports that armed protesters would besiege the mosque, it cancelled the talk.</p><p>But what’s most revealing is the language of Pompeo’s condemnation. He <a href="http://pompeo.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398892">denounced</a> the mosque for inviting Talib to speak “on one of the most holy days on the Christian calendar,” Good Friday, “when millions of Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” Pompeo spoke to his Muslim constituents not as a Congressman bound to equally represent people of all faiths but as a partisan of Christianity, whose religious calendar he demanded they respect. The message was the same one Fransen sends when she <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/trumps-tweets-elevate-a-tiny-fringe-group-of-anti-muslim-activists-in-britain/2017/11/29/02489a42-d515-11e7-9ad9-ca0619edfa05_story.html?utm_term=.2d4584731b8f">walks through Muslim neighborhoods with a giant cross</a>: You are guests in our land.</p><p>Pompeo’s attack on the Islamic Center of Wichita, and his claim that American Muslim leaders are “potentially complicit” in terrorism, become particularly menacing in the context of his support for <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/3892/cosponsors">designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization</a>. Gaffney and Gabriel have both repeatedly claimed that the Brotherhood secretly controls America’s most prominent Muslim organizations and mosques. Pompeo has <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/mike_pompeo_trump_s_pick_for_the_cia_wants_a_holy_war.html">alluded</a> to that theory himself, arguing that “there are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways. They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.” Designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organization <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/frank-gaffney-donald-trump-and-the-denationalization-of-american-muslims/519954/?utm_source=feed">would provide the legal basis for investigations that could cripple American Muslim civil society and religious life</a>.</p><p>Rex Tillerson’s <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/tillerson-blacklisting-muslim-brotherhood-problematic-170614193311591.html">refusal</a> to apply that designation to the Brotherhood made him a <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/07/26/frank-gaffney-state-department-openly-hostile-trump-administration-agenda/">Gaffney target</a>. He served as barrier—albeit a weak and porous one—against the president’s wanton, fevered anti-Muslim bigotry. Now, it appears, that barrier may soon be gone.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedYuri Gripas / ReutersCIA Director Mike Pompeo attends the FDD National Security Summit in Washington on October 19, 2017.Mike Pompeo at State Would Enable Trump's Worst Instincts2017-11-30T19:28:18-05:002017-11-30T19:29:17-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547217If Rex Tillerson is replaced, one barrier keeping the president in check will fall away.<p>When asked by reporters on Wednesday about President Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim videos, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders <a href="https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/935906513159376896">said</a>, “what the President is talking about is the need for national security, the need for military spending.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Her talking points are out of date. The videos are not about “national security” at all. The <a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935609305574903812">first</a> supposedly depicts a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches. (The assailant may have been <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/nov/29/donald-trump-retweets-anti-muslim-videos-far-right/">neither a migrant nor Muslim</a>). The <a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935805606447013888">second</a> supposedly shows a Muslim man destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. It <a href="https://apnews.com/ae8bdfaa43a64e8ebc4a319fce3ddff3">appears to have been filmed in Syria</a>. The <a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935775552102981633">third</a> apparently shows an “Islamist mob” pushing “a teenage boy off a roof.” It <a href="https://apnews.com/ae8bdfaa43a64e8ebc4a319fce3ddff3">comes from Egypt</a>. None involves terrorism against the United States or even Europe. None could have been prevented by more “military spending.”</p><p>Sanders is behind the times. Trump’s tweets show that, increasingly, America’s purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry no longer need terrorism as a rationalization. Islamophobia is finding new justifications, which don’t rely on ISIS or Al Qaeda detonating bombs in London or Chicago. And in that way, it’s embedding itself more deeply in America’s political terrain.</p><p>It’s no surprise that Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/us/politics/trump-anti-muslim-videos-jayda-fransen.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=first-column-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news">may have learned</a> about the videos from Ann Coulter, who has been at the forefront of this Islamophobia 2.0. Her 2016 book, <em>Adios America,</em> which Trump <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-white-strategy/485612/?utm_source=feed">called</a> “a great read,” is filled with descriptions of Muslim depravity. It declares that in Lewiston, Maine, “Somali boys roam the streets physically assaulting the locals.” It includes a section on “Muslim Rape Culture.” And it mocks “Muslim refugees from tribal societies” who are “thunderstruck by indoor plumbing.” It’s only peripherally about terrorism. For Coulter, the problem with letting Muslims enter the United States is not that they commit terrorism. Terrorism is merely a symptom of their deeper hostility to American values, a hostility that expresses itself in a wide variety of ways: from beating up white kids to raping white women to ripping off the welfare state to generally being unsanitary.</p><p>Read <em>Breitbart</em> and you’ll find the same, generalized, anti-Muslim sentiment. Breitbart publishes loads of headlines about Muslims, white women, and rape: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/07/30/halal-chief-australian-women-need-muslims-fertilise/">Halal Chief: ‘Australian Women Need Muslims to Fertilize Them’</a>” (July 30), “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/09/06/gang-rape-white-girls-not-racist-judge/">Pakistani Gang’s Rape of White Girls Was Not Racist, Says Sentencing Judge</a>” (September 6), “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/11/28/books-islamic-schools-teaching-marital-rape-domestic-violence/">UK: Books in Islamic Schools Teach Marital Rape and Domestic Violence</a>” (November 28). It serves up articles about Muslims and crime: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/09/25/almost-half-crimes-berlin-migrants/">Almost Half of Crimes in Berlin Committed by Migrants</a>” (September 25), Muslims and drugs: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/06/26/german-police-worried-asylum-seekers-taking-drug-trade/">German Police: Asylum Seekers Are Taking over Illegal Drug Trade</a>,” (June 26), Muslims not assimilating: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/07/muslim-immigrants-must-not-assimilate-says-progressive-ally-linda-sarsour/">Muslim Immigrants Must Not Assimilate, Says Progressive Ally Linda Sarsour</a>” (July 7), Muslims threatening free speech: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/11/06/tell-mama-google-censor-anti-muslim/">Dodgy Data Islamic Group Demands Google Censor ‘Anti-Muslim’ Results</a>,” (November 6), Muslims hating dogs: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/07/18/woman-hospitalised-somali-dogs-unclean/">Dogwalker Hospitalised After Attack By Somalian Migrant Who Said ‘Dogs are Unclean’</a>” (July 18), Muslims abusing welfare: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/01/25/migrants-welfare-holiday-homelands/">Migrants Who ‘Fled War’ Use Welfare to Holiday in Homelands</a>” (Jan 25) and Muslims discriminating against Christians: “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/10/02/malaysia-muslim-only-laundromat-ensure-purity-clothing/">Malaysia Opens Muslim-Only Laundromat to Ensure ‘Purity’ of Clothing</a>” (October 2).</p><p>To be sure, <em>Breitbart</em> lavishly covers any terrorist attack involving a Muslim. But its interest in jihadist terrorism is merely a subset of its interest in Muslim depravity. When there are no terrorist attacks, it uncovers horror stories about Muslim Laundromats.</p><p>As with Trump’s videos, many of these stories come from Europe. The message is clear: Europe, which once succumbed to Nazis and Communists, is now succumbing to Muslims. America must keep these new barbarians out (and if they’re already here, down) because even if they don’t join ISIS, they’ll violate and defile us in myriad other ways.</p><p>Increasingly, the Trumpian right’s anti-Muslim bigotry conforms to the templates established by anti-black racism (Muslims are violent, lazy and a threat to white women) and by previous anti-immigrant scares (Muslims are disloyal and incapable of upholding democratic norms). Coulter often conflates the threat from Muslims and Latinos, both of whom contribute to the “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/coulter-hates-the-browning-of-america">browning of America</a>.”</p><p>For years, liberals have argued that the American right’s obsession with terrorism (as opposed to, for instance, gun violence, which kills many more Americans) fuels Islamophobia. But more and more, the causality runs the other way: The American right’s Islamophobia fuels its obsession with terrorism. Thus, in terrorism’s absence, pro-Trump conservatives simply demonize Muslims for other things.</p><p>In the years to come, the “war on terror” could conceivably end. But the message of Trump’s retweets is that the assault on American Muslims, sadly, seems likely to go on and on.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedRingo Chiu / ReutersThe Right's Islamophobia Has Nothing to Do With National Security 2017-11-30T10:59:51-05:002017-11-30T15:44:30-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547130Conservatives are finding new justifications for anti-Muslim sentiments—and embedding them more deeply in America’s political terrain.<p>Early on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump retweeted three graphically anti-Muslim videos—one entitled “<a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935775552102981633">Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death</a>!,” the second entitled “<a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935805606447013888">Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary</a>!” and the third entitled “<a href="https://twitter.com/JaydaBF/status/935609305574903812">Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches</a>!”—posted by British First leader Jayda Fransen, a woman <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/03/deputy-leader-britain-first-guilty-over-verbal-abuse-muslim-woman-jayda-fransen-hijab">convicted</a> last year by a British court of harassing a woman wearing a hijab.</p><p>None of this should come as a surprise. Trump has been associating with anti-Muslim bigots, and parroting their arguments, since before he launched his presidential campaign. In May 2015, a month before he entered the race, Trump journeyed to Iowa to speak at a forum hosted by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP), a think tank that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/frank-gaffney-donald-trump-and-the-denationalization-of-american-muslims/519954/?utm_source=feed">specializes in in arguing that devout Muslims cannot be loyal Americans because Islamic law, or Sharia, violates the Constitution.</a> During his speech, Trump mentioned that he had been chatting backstage with “some experts,” one of whom was a woman named Ann who was “so good, she was telling things that you wouldn’t even believe.” Two months earlier, Ann Corcoran had published a CSP report that urged Americans to “speak up against the opening of more mosques in your neighborhoods,” to “say no” to requests for “special Halal food section[s],” and to oppose efforts to require “local government to pay for a Muslim cemetery.” Citing Corcoran, Trump fumed that “if you come from Europe, you’re European, you’ve done great in school, you want to come, you want to come to the United States, you can’t get in, but if you’re Muslim, you can get in.” According to the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clare-lopez-adviser_us_582a2bede4b02d21bbca3e80"><em>Huffington Pos</em></a><em><a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clare-lopez-adviser_us_582a2bede4b02d21bbca3e80">t</a></em>, Trump would go on to cite “research from the Center for Security Policy dozens of times in press releases and speeches during his presidential campaign.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Then, at a rally in New Hampshire in September, a man <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/17/trump-doesnt-correct-rally-attendee-who-says-obama-is-muslim-and-not-even-an-american/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.b8892769eb25">told</a> Trump that, “We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims,” before asking, “When can we get rid of them?” Trump’s answer: “You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.” After a large ISIS terrorist attack in Paris in November, Trump told MSNBC he would “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/16/donald-trump-would-strongly-consider-closing-some-mosques-in-the-united-states/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.b4891cc24777">strongly consider</a>” closing certain American mosques. A few days later, at a rally in Alabama, Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-defends-bogus-muslim-claim-and-rough-treatment-of-black-protester/2015/11/22/b93e7f3a-913f-11e5-a2d6-f57908580b1f_story.html?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.b8ca7d9069fc">claimed</a> to have seen Muslims in Jersey City celebrating the 9/11 attacks—then kept <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.20e78429c598">repeating</a> the charge even after it was debunked.</p><p>It went on like this throughout the campaign. In December, after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Trump issued a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.4d800ffd8e2c">statement</a> demanding “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” The statement cited a <a href="http://bridge.georgetown.edu/new-poll-on-american-muslims-is-grounded-in-bias-riddled-with-flaws/">bogus poll</a>, commissioned by—you guessed it—the Center for Security Policy, which allegedly showed that a majority of American Muslims want the choice to be governed by Sharia law.</p><p>The following February, Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/03/trump-and-rubio-question-president-obamas-visit-to-a-mosque/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.5813d7c4ab7d">twice</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/701084443889381377?lang=en">suggested</a> that President Obama preferred Islam to Christianity. He urged American troops to emulate General John Pershing, who—Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/20/trumps-story-about-killing-terrorists-with-bullets-dipped-in-pigs-blood-is-likely-not-true/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.a068871aee27">falsely claimed</a>—murdered Muslim Filipino prisoners of war with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood. Trump rounded out the month by holding a “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/actforamerica/photos/a.441861226363.238280.50783931363/10153252037226364/?type=3&amp;theater">national-security briefing</a>” at Mar a Lago with Brigitte Gabriel, who has <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-rodda/maher-season-premiere-inc_b_168972.html">declared</a> that “a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day—this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.” Gabriel’s organization, ACT for America, <a href="https://actforamericahouston.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/whats-wrong-with-halal-food/,">protests</a> the sale of halal food and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/act-america">scours textbooks</a> in an effort to eliminate references that equate Islam with Judaism and Christianity.</p><p>In March, Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/">told</a> CNN that “I think Islam hates us.” In June, he <a href="http://www.politifact.com/nbc/statements/2016/jun/18/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrong-theres-no-real-assimilation-us-/">said</a> “there’s no real assimilation” by even “second- and third-generation” Muslim Americans.</p><p>Then, last fall, Trump won the presidency, and groups like ACT and the Center for Security Policy gained access to the White House. As his first national-security adviser, Trump chose Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who <a href="http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2016/06/28/trump-adviser-joins-act-for-americas-board/">sits</a> on ACT for America’s board and who, at an ACT event in August 2016, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCaL04jD9vU">suggested</a> that Islam should not be able to “protect itself behind what we call freedom of religion” because “I don’t see Islam as a religion. I see it as a political ideology.” As his CIA Director, Trump appointed Mike Pompeo, who in 2016 <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/act-for-america-trump-influence_us_58508f98e4b092f086861e1c">won</a> ACT’s National Security Eagle Award. For his attorney general, he named Jeff Sessions, who in 2015 won the CSP’s <a href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/event/2015-keeper-of-the-flame-awards-dinner-honoring-senator-jeff-sessions-r-al/">Keeper of the Flame Award</a>. And Trump named as his chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has said Frank Gaffney is doing “<a href="about:blank">God’s work</a>” and in 2015 <a href="https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-pamela-geller-november-17-2015">declared</a> that any mosque that preaches “sedition” should “be shut.”</p><p>Given this history, there’s nothing surprising about Trump disseminating the works of Jayda Fransen. The interesting question is why he did it now. The simplest answer is that fear and hatred of Muslims boosts Trump politically. As Nate Silver has <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/past-terrorist-attacks-helped-trump-capitalize-on-anti-muslim-sentiment/">noted</a>, Trump was losing ground to Ben Carson in the two months before November 2015, when the attacks in San Bernardino and Paris boosted fears of terrorism to <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/262894-poll-concern-about-terrorism-at-post-9-11-levels">levels unseen since the aftermath of 9/11</a>. Trump responded to those attacks with a flurry of Islamophobia: musing about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/16/donald-trump-would-strongly-consider-closing-some-mosques-in-the-united-states/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.eeb7c8d7584b">closing mosques</a> and creating <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/nov/24/donald-trumps-comments-database-american-muslims/">databases</a> of American Muslims, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.175d5176da3f">insisting</a> that New Jersey Muslims cheered 9/11, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/?tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.02595284ade3">proposing</a> a Muslim ban, which was <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/poll-muslim-ban-support-216748">popular</a> among Republican primary voters. By mid-December, Silver <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/past-terrorist-attacks-helped-trump-capitalize-on-anti-muslim-sentiment/">observed</a>, Trump’s support in 538.com’s “high-sensitivity polling average” had risen eight points. Neither Carson nor any other GOP contender seriously threatened his lead in the national polls again.</p><p>Now Trump’s approval rating is <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/">stuck below 40 percent</a>. ISIS is losing ground in Iraq and Syria, and thus receding somewhat as a focus of Washington debate. <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.aspx">Fewer Americans cite terrorism and immigration</a>—which for Trump supporters are inextricably linked—as their top concern compared with earlier periods this year. So it makes political sense for Trump to take a few minutes in the early morning to stoke rage against the people who during the campaign he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/world/asia/philippines-trump-terrorist-nation.html?_r=0">repeatedly</a> called “<a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/358583-trump-nyc-attacker-was-a-degenerate-animal">animals</a>.” His decision to retweet Fransen’s videos wasn’t a gaffe. It’s a core part of his strategy for remaining president. And the weaker he grows politically, the more extreme his incitements to anti-Muslim violence will become.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedChris O'Meara / APTrump’s Anti-Muslim Political Strategy2017-11-29T11:50:18-05:002017-11-29T11:50:18-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-547031Whenever the president starts losing control politically, he looks to incite rage in his base.<p>Earlier this week, <em>New York</em> magazine’s Jonathan Chait <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/what-if-democrats-majority-hinged-on-a-child-molester.html">asked</a> his fellow liberals to imagine that Roy Moore were a Democrat. “It’s easy to feel superior about this when opposition to grotesque treatment of teenage girls lines up neatly with your own party’s well-being,” he wrote. “If you’re a liberal, ask yourself what you would do if the circumstances were reversed.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Thanks to Al Franken, we can now answer that question better. The details of each man’s offense differ: Moore is accused of pursuing teenager girls while he was in his 30s, and two women have accused him of sexually assaulting them when they were teenagers. Leeann Tweeden, a broadcaster for KABC in Los Angeles, said Franken kissed and groped her without her consent. Still, each party’s reaction is telling. Each is split, but in opposite ways.</p><p>In the GOP, the people taking the harshest line against Moore are congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell. They want Moore to withdraw from his Senate race largely because they fear Democrats will use him to tar other Republican candidates as sexist, as they did in 2012 when Todd Akin, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Missouri, said it was impossible for women to get pregnant from “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rep-todd-akin-legitimate-rape-statement-and-reaction.html">legitimate rape</a>.” But McConnell and company have been stymied by local Alabama Republicans—and Donald Trump-supporting media personalities like Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity—who won’t abandon Moore. In the GOP, it’s the Washington establishment that wants Moore gone. Grassroots activists and the right-wing media want him to stay. </p><p>In the Democratic Party—so far—it’s largely the reverse. As of Thursday night, not a single Democratic senator had called on Franken to resign. While decrying his behavior, they’ve mostly called for an investigation by the congressional Ethics Committee, which isn’t all that punitive given that the committee—as <em>The Atlantic</em>’s Elaine Godfrey has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/democrats-embrace-ethics-committee-inquiry-for-senator-franken/546122/?utm_source=feed">noted</a>—has “not issued disciplinary sanctions against anyone in nine years.”</p><p>The pressure on Franken to resign is coming from the bottom up. While Alabama Republican politicians have stuck with Moore despite pressure from Washington, in the Democratic Party, it’s local Minnesota Democrats who are demanding that Franken go. On Thursday, Minnesota State Auditor and gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/two-prominent-minnesota-democrats-call-on-al-franken-to-resign/article/2640991">called</a> on Franken to resign. So did Megan Thomas, who runs the Minnesota party’s Feminist Caucus.</p><p>Prominent liberal journalists are also urging Franken to resign. <em>New York Times</em> columnist Michelle Goldberg has said he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/al-franken-sexual-harassment.html?_r=0">must</a> leave the Senate. So has Mark Joseph Stern in <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/11/al_franken_should_resign_immediately.html"><em>Slate</em></a>, and a host of <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/360690-celebs-call-for-resignation-jail-time-for-franken">liberal celebrities</a>. (For her part, Tweeden has said she <a href="http://time.com/5028172/leeann-tweeden-al-franken-apology/">accepts Franken’s apology.</a>)</p><p>Both parties are divided between people who are reacting politically and people who are reacting ideologically. In the GOP, the politically minded—who run the congressional Republican Party—want Moore to go because they fear his impact on the party’s chances next fall. But the ideologically minded Alabama conservatives—and the media personalities who influence them—want Moore to stay in the race because they see the attack on him as part of a broader assault by the liberal media. The steering committee of the Alabama Republican Party is <a href="https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/931266801329156098">standing behind Moore</a>. And in so doing, it likely represents the view of conservative Alabamans as a whole. A <a href="http://winwithjmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Alabama-Senate-Executive-Summary-General-Election-Poll-2.pdf">JMC Analytics poll</a> taken between November 9 and 11 found that 37 percent of self-described evangelicals in Alabama actually said the charges against Moore made them more likely to vote for him compared to only 28 percent who said the charges made them less likely to. Moore’s supporters see the attacks on him as part of a culture war, which they’re determined to wage even if costs their party seats.</p><p>In the Democratic Party, by contrast, the politically minded—Charles Schumer and company—don’t want to imperil a safe Senate seat if they don’t have to. Ideologically minded liberals, by contrast, fear that letting Franken stay in his job will make it easier for other sexual harassers to escape punishment. If Franken stays, writes Goldberg, “The current movement toward unprecedented accountability for sexual harassers will probably start to peter out. Republicans, never particularly eager to hold their own to account, will use Franken to deflect from more egregious abuse on their own side.” For Goldberg, sustaining the post-Weinstein cultural and moral reckoning is more important than ensuring a Democratic seat in the senate.</p><p>The Moore and Franken battles constitute yet more evidence that the bases of the two parties are even more polarized than their leaders in Washington. In dealing with sexual harassment, congressional Democratic and Republican leaders aren’t that far apart. Both see eruptions like Moore and Franken’s as political problems to be managed so they don’t hurt the party as a whole. The larger gulf is between grassroots liberal activists who want to change men’s behavior, no matter the political fallout, and conservative activists who see sexual-harassment claims against Republicans as a conspiracy by the liberal media.</p><p>In both parties, power is devolving from top to bottom, from political strategists to ideological activists. Mitch McConnell can’t tell Roy Moore what to do and, I suspect, Charles Schumer won’t be able to tell Minnesota Democrats either. The result: If I had to bet which man is more likely to be in the Senate next January, I’d put my money on Roy Moore.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJ. Scott Applewhite / APSenator Al Franken listens at a committee hearing at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 21, 2017.The Deepening Partisan Split Over Sexual Misconduct2017-11-17T11:01:59-05:002017-11-17T12:53:53-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-546194While the leadership of both parties views sexual misconduct as a political problem to minimize, the Republican and Democratic bases could not be farther apart.<p dir="ltr">In 1991, the African-American Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter wrote a book called <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Affirmative-Action-Stephen-Carter/dp/0465068693?_encoding=UTF8&amp;redirect=true">Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby</a>.</em> I remember reading part of it at the time. Little did I realize that the book’s title applied to me.</p><p>Two years after Carter published his book, I joined the<em> New Republic </em>as a summer intern. I was thrilled. I had been reading the magazine since high school, and idolized its most prominent writers: Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Michael Kelly, and, yes, Leon Wieseltier, who last month was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen of his former colleagues. If someone had made <em>TNR</em> writers into baseball cards, by age 15 I would have had a complete set.</p><p dir="ltr">I considered myself qualified. Because I’d spent years mimicking <em>TNR</em>’s writing style, I had the right sort of clips. But as a white man graduating from an Ivy League school, I also had the right sort of identity. It was difficult to disentangle the two. And I didn’t really try.</p><p dir="ltr">I didn’t try because the magazine afforded me extraordinary opportunity. Soon, I was not only working alongside people I revered, I was being given the chance to ascend to their level. Asking how much of their success was due to race, gender, and class—as opposed to merit—would have meant asking the same of myself.</p><p dir="ltr">At some level, I knew the answer. White men from fancy schools advanced quickly at the<em> New Republic</em> because that’s who the owner and editor in chief, Marty Peretz, liked surrounding himself with. He ignored women almost entirely. There were barely any African Americans on staff, which is hardly surprising given that in 1994—after my internship and before I returned to the magazine as managing editor—<em>TNR</em> published an excerpt of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book, <em>The Bell Curve</em> (along with a series of critical responses). Marty felt a particular hostility to affirmative action. The irony—which I didn’t dwell on at the time—was that the magazine was itself a hothouse of racial and sexual preference. Those racial and sexual preferences were never stated formally. But to a significant degree, they determined who felt comfortable at <em>TNR</em> and who won the favor of the people who ran it. To borrow Ta-Nehisi Coates’s metaphor, my race, gender, and class provided me a “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/?utm_source=feed">tailwind</a>.” I was running hard. But without that tailwind, it’s unlikely I would have become the magazine’s editor at age 28.</p><p dir="ltr">Like Carter, I was a beneficiary of affirmative action. Except that his version remedied historic injustices. Mine perpetuated them.</p><p dir="ltr">The<em> New Republic</em>’s affirmative action enabled Leon Wieseltier’s sexual harassment, and Leon’s sexual harassment reinforced the magazine’s affirmative action. Men ran the magazine, and Leon’s behavior helped keep it that way. To ascend at <em>TNR</em>, you had to be a protégé of either Marty’s or Leon’s, or, at the very least, you had to be on decent terms with them. For men, that meant writing things they considered smart. For women, by contrast, mentorship was far trickier. Marty wasn’t an option. Leon was, but his mentorship often involved sexualization. If you accepted it, you gained a supporter but compromised yourself. If you spurned it, you became invisible to the magazine’s two most powerful men.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">I’d like to say that when I became editor, I fundamentally changed all this. But I did not. Yes, I hired women, including for senior editing jobs. Yes, I made some effort to cultivate writers of color. But, for the most part—like all the white, male, Ivy League editors who preceded and succeeded me—I perpetuated the culture in which I had thrived. That culture was both subtle and pervasive: The absence of women and people of color in senior editorial jobs was intertwined with the magazine’s long-standing, jaundiced view of the African American and feminist left. Had I challenged that culture more emphatically, I would probably not have become editor in the first place.</p><p dir="ltr">There are things about my era at <em>TNR</em> that I’m proud of: the magazine’s call for American action to end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, Andrew Sullivan’s history-altering arguments for gay marriage. <em>TNR</em> published a great deal of excellent journalism. But in retrospect, I used that good work to justify a series of moral compromises. From my time as a junior editor, I was handed pieces to edit—generally written or commissioned by Marty—that made sweeping, hostile generalizations about Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims. I would cut as much as I felt I could get away with and soften or nuance the rest. But I didn’t refuse to edit the pieces at all, since that would have imperiled my relationship with my mentors. (In fact, when I began writing more critically about Israeli policy after leaving the magazine, my relationships with both Marty and Leon swiftly declined.)</p><p dir="ltr">In some cases, the moral compromises weren’t ideological. When Marty fired Michael Kelly (who later became the editor of <em>The Atlantic</em>), in part because Kelly was critical of Marty’s friend and former student Al Gore, I considered resigning. But I feared I’d never find another job I enjoyed as much. Two years later, I was editor myself.</p><p dir="ltr">In ways I didn’t recognize at the time, those concessions created the template for my response to my former colleague Sarah Wildman when, in 2002, she told me about Leon’s inappropriate sexual advances. I believed her and grasped the seriousness of the charge. I also knew that I lacked authority over Leon. He had been literary editor since I was an intern and for decades enjoyed complete autonomy over the “back of the book.” The magazine had no sexual-harassment procedures. So I called Marty—who spent most of his time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York—and asked him to come to Washington to tell Leon that his behavior was unacceptable. (Marty has told <em><a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/11/9/16624588/new-republic-harassment">Vox</a></em> that I never reported the incident to him and that he doesn’t “remember Sarah Wildman.” Leon did not respond to my request for comment.)</p><p dir="ltr">Marty, Leon, and I met at the Willard Hotel. When I confronted him, Leon—who had a gift for intimidation—reacted ferociously. “Is this some kind of intervention?” he roared. Marty didn’t push back. That was it. Leon never admitted to having done anything wrong, and he received no punishment. Sarah, having incurred Leon’s wrath, <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/11/9/16624588/new-republic-harassment">felt isolated at the magazine and left</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">I could have threatened to resign. Given the closeness of their relationship, and the degree to which Marty relied on Leon intellectually, it’s unlikely Marty would have fired Leon to placate me. I was more expendable. On the other hand, firing me over a sexual-harassment charge—even in 2002—would have made <em>TNR</em> look awful. Had I threatened to resign—or simply done so—I might have shifted the power dynamic and forced Marty into taking some action that punished Leon and validated Sarah, which might have begun to erode the impunity that made Leon’s behavior possible.</p><p>But I did not. By 2002, I had already made a series of moral compromises in order to stay at <em>TNR</em>, and in ways I didn’t fully realize, each laid the foundation for the next.</p><p dir="ltr">I don’t know whether my experience is typical of men who are complicit in institutions that tolerate sexual harassment. What I do know is that the affirmative action I enjoyed, and the sexual harassment Sarah suffered, were connected. I was given extraordinary opportunity at <em>TNR</em>, in large measure, because talented women like Sarah Wildman were not.</p><p dir="ltr">In this regard, I suspect, I have something in common with the supporters of Donald Trump. It’s not pleasant to realize that the bygone age you romanticize—the age when America was still great—was great for you, or people like you, because others were denied a fair shot. In the America of the 1950s, or even the 1980s, white, straight, native-born American men didn’t worry as much about competing with Salvadoran immigrants and Chinese factory workers and professional women and Joshua-generation African Americans.</p><p dir="ltr">Except for among the ultra-rich, the American pie is not expanding all that much. And so a lot of white American men look at Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, and mass immigration, and the global competition for jobs, and the taking-down of Confederate monuments, and even the revolt against sexual harassment, and fear that all of this means there will be less left for them. And they experience these attacks on their privilege as a desecration of the natural order, an attack on institutions that benefited them and to which they felt deep loyalty in return.</p><p dir="ltr">What kind of journalistic career would I have had without affirmative action? A less successful one, probably. Ensuring that I am never again complicit in an institution that tolerates sexual harassment means embracing a world in which I lose some of my undeserved advantage. Only by doing that can I offer the women of the<em> New Republic</em> the apology they deserve. </p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedFrances Benjamin Johnston / Library of Congress / The AtlanticReflections of an Affirmative-Action Baby2017-11-14T11:38:00-05:002017-11-17T13:38:24-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545774White men from fancy schools advanced quickly at the<em> New Republic.</em> Asking how much of their success was due to race, gender, and class would have meant asking the same of myself.<p>When Donald Trump addressed South Korea’s parliament earlier this week, The Associated Press <a href="https://www.apnews.com/19aece3ccf5c4c9496a777497379e709">noted</a> his “striking shift in tone.” After Trump journeyed from Seoul to Beijing, <em>The New York Times</em> made a video entitled “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005538729/trumps-striking-change-in-tone-on-china.html?emc=eta1">Trump’s striking change in tone on China</a>.”</p><p>But the change isn’t all that striking. It’s predictable. Trump insults people from afar and then praises them in person. He demands they change their behavior, and then forgets those demands when they’re in the room. He’s been doing it consistently for at least a year.</p><p>As The Associated Press noted, Trump in September <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/904309527381716992?refsrc=email&amp;s=11">tweeted</a>, “South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work.” But this week, standing alongside South Korea’s dovish president Moon Jae In at a press conference, Trump’s belittling, hardline tone disappeared. Instead, he <a href="https://www.apnews.com/19aece3ccf5c4c9496a777497379e709">said</a>, “It makes sense for North Korea to come to the table and make a deal that is good for the people of North Korea and for the world.” As my colleague Uri Friedman has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/donald-trump-japan-south-korea/545285/?utm_source=feed">noted</a>, Trump—who during the campaign <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/11/10/501531166/japan-and-south-korea-rattled-by-trumps-talk-of-closing-u-s-bases">suggested</a> U.S. troops should leave the peninsula because the South Koreans “<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/11/10/501531166/japan-and-south-korea-rattled-by-trumps-talk-of-closing-u-s-bases">do not pay us what they should be paying us</a>,” also lavishly reaffirmed his commitment to South Korea’s defense.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>In Beijing, it was much the same. During the campaign, Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005538729/trumps-striking-change-in-tone-on-china.html?emc=eta1">said</a> China is “ripping us like you’ve never seen” and “we can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” But once actually in China, Trump blamed all this not on China’s government but on his incompetent American predecessors. While citing the “unfair trade practices that drive” a “shockingly” large trade deficit, Trump <a href="https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/politics/Trump-Criticizes-One-Sided-Chinese-Trade-Deals-456289963.html">insisted</a>, “I don’t blame China. After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” To the contrary, he said—as the Chinese crowd applauded—“I give China great credit.”</p><p>All this fits a pattern. Again and again on the campaign trail, Trump insulted undocumented Mexican immigrants and promised to remove them from the country. But in August of last year, when he finally sat down with his Hispanic advisory council, media reports called him “humble” and “conciliatory.” Rather than reiterate his pledge to round up the undocumented, Trump—according to one participant—<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/the-cowardice-of-donald-trump/498704/?utm_source=feed">said</a> “deporting them is neither possible nor humane.”</p><p>Not long after that, Trump met President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City. Instead of discussing his signature campaign proposal—a wall across America’s southern border paid for by Mexico—Trump’s advisers insisted beforehand that neither side raise the subject. And when Peña Nieto did anyway, Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani reportedly insisted that the subject was “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-mexico-trip-was-weeks-in-the-making-1472779067">off the table</a>.”</p><p>At his press conference in Mexico City, Trump called his meeting with Peña Nieto a “great, great honor” and said he had “tremendous feelings” for the “tremendous” Mexican-American people—the same people he had earlier labeled rapists.</p><p>Then Trump flew to a rally in Arizona, where, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-lands-in-mexico-for-last-minute-meeting-with-president-pena-nieto/2016/08/31/6e1a9f8c-6f8f-11e6-8533-6b0b0ded0253_story.html?utm_term=.821d2c721c52">according</a> to <em>The Washington Post</em>, he abandoned his “subdued and cooperative tone” and “returned to the aggressive tenor that has defined much of his campaign.” Speaking to an overwhelmingly white crowd, Trump bellowed, “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.” </p><p>Trump’s interactions with African Americans have been similar. In front of mostly white audiences, Trump during the campaign accused Black Lives Matter of encouraging attacks on police and suggested that African Americans were prone to voter fraud. But in September, when Trump addressed a mostly black church in Detroit, he didn’t repeat any of that. To the contrary, he called black churches “the conscience of our country” and praised them for moving America “toward a better moral character, a deeper concern for mankind, and spirit of charity and unity that binds us all together.” In a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-a-bid-to-soften-his-image-trump-makes-a-brief-visit-to-a-black-detroit-church/2016/09/03/e7d30634-715b-11e6-9705-23e51a2f424d_story.html?utm_term=.81cfd6fcdd65">report</a> on the trip, <em>The Washington Post</em> noted—you guessed it—Trump’s “jarring shift in tone and message.”</p><p>Most politicians shift their tone depending on their audience. It’s human nature, especially for people trying to win votes. Trump’s gyrations, however, are particularly extreme.</p><p>One reason may be his sheer ignorance. Trump knows so little that—when he actually meets the people he rails against—he may be more easily swayed by their arguments. After repeatedly insisting that China could bring North Korea to its knees, Trump—after meeting President Xi in April—<a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/4/12/15279654/trump-north-korea-xi-10-minutes">admitted</a> that, “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”</p><p>Another possible explanation for his radical shifts may be that, when Trump meets formally with foreign leaders—or even organized constituencies—his advisers enjoy a greater influence over what he says. When Trump is on the stump, or on Twitter, he is less encumbered by his advisers.</p><p>But underlying all of this is the simple matter of Trump’s character. He’s highly susceptible to flattery, and feels little obligation today to honor what he said yesterday. Above all, he’s obsessed with the image of himself as tough but has lived a coddled life in which that self-image has rarely truly been tested. All of which means that, when face to face with adversaries able to push back, he’s even more likely than other politicians to give way. The Chinese and South Koreans, it appears, have figured that out.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedThomas Peter / ReutersU.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping attend a state dinner in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017.Trump Insults People From Afar, Then Praises Them in Person2017-11-09T12:17:04-05:002017-11-09T12:56:53-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545462The Chinese and South Koreans have figured out how to leverage the psychology behind the U.S. president’s extreme shifts in tone.<p>Americans have developed a set of rituals around mass shootings. Politicians who oppose gun control pray for the victims. Politicians and journalists who support gun control savage them for praying rather than acting. After the San Bernardino murders in December 2015, the New York <em>Daily News</em> reprinted four Republicans’ tweets about prayer on its cover alongside the words “<a href="http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.2453743.1449152447!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_750/kingprayer4n-7-web.jpg">God Isn’t Fixing This</a>.” After Stephen Paddock killed 58 people in Las Vegas, Chris Murphy <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/914883285473513472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2F">excoriated</a> his Senate colleagues: “Your cowardice to act cannot be whitewashed by thoughts and prayers.” After Sunday’s murders in Texas, when Paul Ryan <a href="https://twitter.com/SpeakerRyan/status/927269491045695488">tweeted</a>, “The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers,” Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal <a href="https://twitter.com/RepJayapal/status/927536813207703552">responded</a>: “They don’t need our prayers. They need us to address gun violence crisis &amp; pass sensible regulation.” </p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Prayapal’s anguish is understandable. But there’s a different—potentially more effective—response. Instead of castigating Republicans for praying rather than acting, gun-control advocates could suggest that, by praying but not acting, Republican politicians aren’t really praying at all.</p><p>Prayer serves various purposes. But in many religious traditions, it is designed to cultivate the spiritual and ethical qualities necessary for righteous action. “Prayer,” <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Grandeur-Spiritual-Audacity-Essays/dp/0374524955">argued</a> Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood.” When he joined Martin Luther King’s 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Heschel famously said, “My legs were praying.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik, arguably the most important 20th-century American modern orthodox rabbi, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/23258675?seq=18#page_scan_tab_contents">wrote</a> that, “Prayer tells the individual, as well as the community, what his, or its, genuine needs are.” Gandhi <a href="http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/gandhiphilosophy/philosophy_god_prayerfoodsoul.htm">insisted</a> that, “Prayer is not … idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, notes that, every morning, when Jews praise God who “clothes the naked,” “releases the bound,” and “raises the downtrodden,” they are also promising to do so themselves, since human beings are supposed to imitate the divine.</p><p>In her forward to the 2003 book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Standing-Need-Prayer-Celebration-Black/dp/0743234669">Standing in the Need of Prayer: A Celebration of Black Prayer</a></em>, Coretta Scott King <a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/2004/01/how-we-open-our-hearts-to-god.aspx#LXyjVK0oyQWToS8M.99">recounts</a> a night during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when her husband was awakened by “a threatening and abusive phone call.” Fearful for his family’s safety, “Martin bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud to God: ‘Lord, I am taking a stand for what I believe is right. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can't face it alone.’”</p><p>He later told her that, “At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear a voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at our side forever.’” She notes that, “When Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a new sense of confidence, and he was ready to face anything.”</p><p>It would be presumptuous to tell Republican members of Congress that their prayers are worthless unless they lead them to support specific legislation. But gun-control advocates might ask politicians like Ryan for at least some evidence that their prayers have deepened their sensitivity to the suffering in Sutherland Springs. Even if Ryan can’t bring himself to rethink gun control—even if he truly believes, like Donald Trump, that the real problem is mental health—he could still challenge Trump’s <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/trump-budgets-deep-cuts-to-block-grants-underscore-danger-of-block-granting">cuts to mental-health funding</a>, or take some other action he thinks might prevent the next such tragedy. </p><p>According to the <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/political-ideology/">Pew Research Center</a>, conservatives are more than twice as likely as liberals to attend religious services every week, and 28 points more likely to pray every day. Given these discrepancies, liberal mockery of conservative prayer reinforces the cultural gulf that separates red and blue America. Better to embrace conservative calls to prayer, and ask to see its fruits.</p><p>“Whenever I open my prayer book,” Heschel <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/is-your-god-dead.html?_r=0">said</a> during the Vietnam War, “I see before me images of children burning from napalm.” Instead of asking conservatives not to pray, liberals can ask them to see in their prayers the victims strewn throughout First Baptist Church, and to act in their name.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJonathan Bachman / Reuters‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Could Be Exactly What America Needs2017-11-07T06:00:00-05:002017-11-08T09:35:56-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545144Gandhi called prayer “the most potent instrument of action.” But will politicians follow through?<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Is American conservatism </span>inherently bigoted? Many conservatives would be enraged by the question. Many liberals suspect the answer is yes.</p><p>These different reactions stem, in part, from different definitions of <i>bigotry</i>. Conservatives tend to define it in terms of intention: You’re guilty of bigotry if you’re trying to harm people because of their race, gender, or the like. Liberals are more likely to define it in terms of impact: You’re guilty if your actions disadvantage an already disadvantaged group, irrespective of your motives. You may genuinely believe that Georgia can’t afford to expand Medicaid. But given that the Georgians affected by this decision are disproportionately poor people of color—and that they lack coverage in large measure because they are poor people of color—your opposition to expanding Medicaid perpetuates a history of state-sponsored bigotry. As a conservative, you may feel an impulse to conserve the past. In a country whose history is marked by the subordination of blacks, women, and LGBT people, however, many liberals believe that conserving the past maintains that subordination.</p><p>The debate over conservatism and bigotry is not new. But the argument has become particularly fierce in the age of Donald Trump. As a result of Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and his equivocal condemnations of white supremacists, outrage at perceived conservative bigotry now animates American liberalism more than it did in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Obama years. In an August 2016 Suffolk University/<i>USA Today</i> poll, 76 percent of Democrats said Trump is a racist. Meanwhile, outrage at political correctness—fueled by the conviction that charges of bigotry are used to shut down legitimate discussion—has become more central to American conservatism. When the website clearerthinking.org examined voters’ responses to 138 different statements, it found that agreement with the claim “There is too much political correctness in this country” was one of the three most correlated with support for Trump.</p><p>Liberals and conservatives may never agree on whether or how deeply bigotry infects American conservatism. They don’t need to. What America needs is a conservatism whose devotees feel less stigmatized, and who earn that lack of stigma by trying harder to disentangle their support of small government and traditional morality from America’s history of bigotry. To make that possible, liberals and conservatives each need something from the other.</p><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Conservatives need liberals </span>to stop abusing their cultural power. Although conservatives dominate America’s elected offices, liberals wield the greater power to stigmatize. In the 1950s, conservatives could exile liberals from polite company by calling them Communists. Being called anti-American can still sting; ask the NFL players who kneel when the national anthem is played. But in most elite institutions, being accused of bigotry is now more dangerous than being accused of insufficient patriotism. In 2014, Brendan Eich was forced out as the head of the tech company Mozilla for having donated to an anti-gay-marriage initiative. He probably would not have been forced out for donating to, say, a campaign to eliminate the Pledge of Allegiance from California’s schools.</p><p>Conservatives feel their cultural vulnerability acutely. In 2011, researchers at Tufts University observed that conservatives consume more “outrage-based” political radio and television than liberals do. One reason, they suggested in a follow-up paper, is that conservatives are more fearful than liberals of discussing politics with people with whom they disagree, because they dread being called a bigot. “When asked how they feel about talking politics,” the researchers noted, “every single conservative respondent raised the issue of being called racist.” Liberals expressed no comparable fear. As a result, they felt less need to take refuge in the “safe political environs provided by outrage-based programs.”</p><p>Obviously, political correctness did not create white supremacy, patriarchy, or homophobia. But as the Tufts researchers showed, shaming people for their views can backfire. In a 2011 study, three social psychologists then based at the University of Toronto gave college students two different pamphlets meant to combat prejudice. The first emphasized the value of nondiscrimination (“It’s fun to meet people from other cultures”). The second emphasized social norms that discourage discrimination (“People in my social circle disapprove of prejudice”). The second pamphlet was not only less effective than the first in reducing bigotry; it actually led manifestations of bigotry to spike. The scholars concluded that pressuring people to accept a nonbigoted belief can engender resentment that leads them to express more bigotry than they did before.</p><p>Liberals would be wise to recognize this vicious cycle, and to use the nuclear epithet more sparingly. Yes, Fox News and company will likely describe political correctness as a menace to white, straight, Christian men no matter what. But liberals can make Sean Hannity’s work harder by resisting the temptation to deploy the label<i> bigoted</i>, or one of its synonyms, when describing an idea they consider stupid or immoral.</p><p>Liberals don’t resist this urge enough. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center called Maajid Nawaz, a British activist who embraces a hard line against Islamism, “an anti-Muslim extremist.” The charge was outrageous. Nawaz may ignore important differences between violent and nonviolent forms of Islamism. He may support policies that violate civil liberties. But as <i>The Atlantic</i>’s David A. Graham <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/10/maajid-nawaz-splc-anti-muslim-extremist/505685/?utm_source=feed">has pointed out</a>, describing him as anti-Muslim is unfair, not only because Nawaz is Muslim, but because he has fought Islamophobia.</p><p>Last fall, following Steve Bannon’s appointment as chief White House strategist, <i>Salon</i> <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/11/14/steve-bannon-runs-an-anti-semitic-website-is-a-misogynist-and-will-be-one-of-donald-trumps-senior-advisors/">called</a> his website, <i>Breitbart News</i>, “anti-Semitic,” while Media Matters for America <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/13/white-nationalist-who-hates-jews-will-be-trumps-right-hand-man-white-house/214419">decried</a> “its rampant anti-Semitism.” Their primary evidence: an article whose <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/15/bill-kristol-republican-spoiler-renegade-jew/">headline</a> described the <i>Weekly Standard </i>editor and Trump critic William Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/09/27/anne-applebaums-russian-style-disinformation-offensive-msm-vs-anti-globalist-right-will-people/">an article</a> that said of the American-born columnist Anne Applebaum, who lives in Poland: “Hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” Sounds bad. But the author of the Kristol attack, David Horowitz, is Jewish himself, and he was accusing Kristol of betraying Jewish interests by opposing Trump, who Horowitz said would safeguard Israel. That may be dumb, but it’s not anti-Semitic. The author of the Applebaum attack, Matthew Tyrmand, is Jewish too. He claimed that Applebaum was upset not to be “Poland’s first Jewish-American first lady” (her husband had briefly run for president), then made his barb about her being “a Polish, Jewish, American elitist.” There’s nothing else about Applebaum’s Jewishness in the article.</p><p>Has <i>Breitbart</i> trafficked in other forms of bigotry? Its menacing headlines about Muslims and Latinos (“Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture,” for instance) suggest the answer is yes. But that doesn’t justify accusing it of anti-Semitism on flimsy evidence. Once liberals decide an individual or institution is reprehensible, they’re often too quick to throw another log on the fire.</p><p>Sometimes, in their zeal to oppose bigotry, liberals defame entire groups. In an analysis of the 2012 election, a political scientist named David T. Smith noted that liberals were significantly more likely than conservatives to say they would not support a Mormon for public office. Why? Smith speculated that the Mormon Church’s support for California’s anti-gay-marriage initiative, along with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, had “firmly entrenched a perception among liberals that Mormons … have an authoritarian religious agenda.” That is, the liberal impulse to oppose discrimination had fostered a discrimination of its own.</p><p>Before calling conservatives bigots, liberals should remember something about their own ideology: Progressivism is progressive. It seeks ever-greater moral advance. That means that if liberals have their way, the list of things considered discriminatory will continue to grow. In August, as a rash of localities debated whether to take down statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Trump was mocked for tweeting, “Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who’s next, Washington, Jefferson?” But it’s logical to suspect that liberals, seeking to make America ever less racist, might go from uprooting statues of the generals who fought to defend slavery to challenging the uncritical veneration of the slaveholders who founded America. Indeed, just three days before Trump’s tweet, Al Sharpton had suggested that the Jefferson Memorial be denied public funds.</p><p>Given conservatives’ instinct to conserve, liberals cannot reasonably expect them to instantly declare bigoted something they have long considered acceptable. John Corvino, a philosophy professor at Wayne State University, <a href="https://kiej.georgetown.edu/trump-bigotry-ethics-stigma/">defines <i>bigotry</i></a> as “stubborn and unjustified contempt toward groups of people, typically in the context of a larger system of subordination.” The word <i>stubborn</i> is key: What matters is how willing people are to shift their views in response to new information. Liberals have the right to ask that conservatives, when confronted with evidence of the irrationality and immorality of their opinions about, for instance, gay Americans, move toward supporting equal rights. But liberals don’t have the right to expect conservatives to move at the same speed they do. Therein lies the unfairness of Mozilla’s forcing Eich out for having donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign in 2008, four years before even Barack Obama fully endorsed gay marriage.</p><p>Because progressivism perpetually raises the antibigotry bar, today’s liberals likely espouse views that future liberals will consider prejudiced. In August, Canada began including on its passports an option for people who identify as neither male nor female. Few American liberals currently see the absence of such a category on U.S. passports as discriminatory. In the future, many likely will. When they do, and find conservatives unwilling to jump on board, they should consider how they would have felt had someone called them a bigot back in 2017.</p><figure><img alt="" height="778" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/10/Nonracist_Conservatism_DEF_web/c6c088c19.jpg" width="700"><figcaption class="credit">Edmon de Haro</figcaption></figure><p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">If nurturing a </span>less bigoted conservatism requires liberals to become less promiscuous in crying bigot, it requires conservatives to become less willfully naive. In theory, the conservative principles of individual responsibility and traditional morality are color-blind. Indeed, as the scholars Christopher Alan Bracey and Leah Wright Rigueur have detailed, they enjoy significant popularity among African Americans.</p><p>But race often distorts their application. When conservative politicians talk about reducing “dependency” on government, they usually mean reliance on programs like food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, housing assistance, and Medicaid, all of which disproportionately benefit African Americans. They pay less attention to the roughly $20 billion a year that the federal government pays farmers. Or the 1872 law that allows mining companies to lease federal land for $5 an acre and keep whatever they dig up. Or Supplemental Security Income, otherwise known as disability. These forms of dependency, which offer outsize benefits to white people, elicit comparatively little right-wing outrage.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>Similarly, many conservatives demanded harsher sentencing during the largely African American crack epidemic, yet now show far less enthusiasm for imprisoning opioid addicts—most of whom are white. For years, conservatives tried to preserve the traditional family by outlawing same-sex marriage. They didn’t try to outlaw heterosexual divorce. Senator Ted Cruz has called defending religious freedom his “life’s passion.” But not when it comes to Muslims. In 2015, he reintroduced the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, which could have, among other things, empowered the government to close mosques.</p><p>There are, to be sure, right-leaning intellectuals who would welcome the uniform application of conservative tough love. But advocating the mass imprisonment of white opioid users, the end of farm subsidies, and a crackdown on easy divorce would likely break the Republican Party. So GOP politicians often end up demanding more self-reliance and moral responsibility from black, female, LGBT, and immigrant Americans than from their own white, male, straight, native-born supporters. “Racism,” Ta‑Nehisi Coates <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/?utm_source=feed">has written in these pages</a>, “is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” It is exactly this racialized disparity in sympathy and skepticism that plagues many conservative policies today.</p><p>Prominent black Republicans have said as much. In a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Colin Powell noted that “some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education, but you hardly hear a whimper when it’s affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests.”</p><p>Conservatives wishing to disprove charges of racial bad faith have an obvious place to begin: GOP efforts to make voting harder for minorities, under the guise of preventing voter fraud. In theory, voter fraud is a legitimate, nonbigoted concern. The problem is, a mountain of evidence suggests that in the United States in 2017, it barely exists. Moreover, throughout U.S. history, white politicians have tried to prevent African Americans from voting. And that’s exactly what some Republicans are trying to do today.</p><p>The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found last year that North Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature had “restricted voting and registration” in ways that targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” In 2016, a former GOP staffer in the Wisconsin state legislature <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html">reported</a>, “I was in the closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of the GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters.” Too often, that’s what conservative “color blindness” looks like when the cameras are off.</p><p>Conservatives sometimes deny there is anything they can do to convince liberals they aren’t bigots. But when conservatives acknowledge bigotry’s persistence, liberals do take notice. In a remarkable August 2015 interview on Fox News, Marco Rubio was asked for his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement. He said he understood the frustration with the police that fueled it. “I have one friend in particular who’s been stopped, in the last 18 months, eight to nine different times,” Rubio explained. “Never got a ticket for being stopped—just stopped. If that happened to me, after eight or nine times, I’d be wondering, <i>What’s going on here?</i> I’d be upset about it.”</p><p><i>Breitbart</i> slammed Rubio’s comments as anti-cop. But liberals responded with admiration. “Marco Rubio shows other Republicans how to respond to Black Lives Matter,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/9/30/9427919/marco-rubio-black-lives-matter">proclaimed</a> <i>Vox</i>. <i>Slate</i>’s Jamelle Bouie tweeted, “Marco Rubio just gave the best answer on Black Lives Matter that I’ve seen from a Republican.” Rubio, it’s worth noting, hadn’t endorsed the Black Lives Matter agenda. He had simply acknowledged that the law-and-order policies conservatives generally support can place a special burden on black people.</p><p>Is it politically shrewd for an ambitious Republican like Rubio to admit these ugly truths? Maybe not. But American debates over race, gender, sexuality, and religion have become as noxious as they are because Donald Trump took risks. By nakedly appealing to white rage and fear, he risked alienating moderate voters. His risks paid off.</p><p>Halting the downward spiral will require other politicians to take risks as well. And it will require scores of commentators, activists, and voters to support them when they do. Liberals and conservatives each know the other side is capable of hatred and scorn. They both need to demonstrate that they are capable of empathy and courage, too.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedEdmon de Haro<em>Republican</em> Is Not a Synonym for <em>Racist</em>2017-11-06T08:00:00-05:002017-11-14T06:08:10-05:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:39-544128Conservatives must reckon with their policies’ discriminatory effects. That would be more likely if liberals stopped carelessly crying bigot.<p>On Tuesday night, hours after the terrorist attack in New York City, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham went on Fox News to express his gratitude that, at times like these, Donald Trump is president. “The one thing I like about President Trump, he understands that we’re in a religious war,” Graham declared. “Here’s what I like about President Trump,” he added later, “the gloves are off.” Trump, Graham explained, “is right to make sure when somebody comes into the country from a place where radical Islam [flourishes] … we’re going to ask extra hard questions.” And Trump is—you guessed it—“right to slow down who comes into this country.” When the Fox anchor turned to Robert Mueller’s indictment of two former Trump campaign officials, Graham’s enthusiasm didn’t flag. “If I’m the Trump team,” Graham <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/10/31/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-understands-religious-war/">declared</a>, “I’d rest pretty good tonight.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>Graham’s comments illustrate one of the most fascinating dynamics of the Trump era: Trump exposes the character of the politicians around him. As a political force, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/jeff-flake-joins-the-conservative-exodus/543909/?utm_source=feed">anti-Trump conservatism is dead</a>. That means GOP members of Congress who consider Trump an ignorant, narcissistic, lying, authoritarian bully (and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/us/politics/bob-corker-trump-interview-transcript.html">according to Bob Corker</a>, many do) face a choice between their principles and their jobs. Corker and Jeff Flake have chosen the former. Most of their colleagues have chosen the latter. But none has done so as loudly as Lindsey Graham.</p><p>We don’t have to guess what Graham really thinks of Trump. He’s told us. In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of <em>The Washington Post</em> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/07/the-10-republicans-who-hate-donald-trump-the-most-ranked/?utm_term=.d95cef7002d3">enumerated</a> “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one. And for good reason. That month, the South Carolina senator tweeted that even if Trump won the Republican nomination, Graham would not support him because Trump had not “<a href="https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/728638714344177666?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fthe-fix%2Fwp%2F2016%2F05%2F07%2Fthe-10-republicans-who-hate-donald-trump-the-most-ranked%2F">displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as Commander in Chief</a>.” Graham even implied he might back Hillary Clinton. In June, when Trump said Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly adjudicate his case because he was Mexican American, Graham <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/us/politics/democrats-trump-presidential-race.html">called</a> it “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy. If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it. There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”</p><p>Evidently not. More than a year later, Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in <em>The New York Times</em>, the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/politics/trump-lindsey-graham-best-friends.html?_r=0">Senate’s Trump whisperer</a>.” He golfs with Trump. He travels with him on Air Force One. And he insists that Trump is “<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/23/trump-lindsey-graham-congress-allies-244000">growing into the job</a>.” Last month, when Corker questioned Trump’s fitness in terms similar to those Graham used during the campaign, Graham said his colleague’s comments were not “<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-lindsey-graham-corkers-comments-trump-helpful/story?id=50414508">particularly helpful</a>.” When Flake gave an impassioned speech from the senate floor about the threat Trump posed to liberal democracy, Graham explained that, for his part, “<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/lindsey-graham-id-stand-up-to-trump-but-im-trying-to-get-taxes-cut">I’d rather not be a constant critic</a>.” After all, Graham <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/23/trump-lindsey-graham-congress-allies-244000">admitted</a> in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”</p><p>Nowhere is Graham’s transformation more dramatic than on the question highlighted by Tuesday’s attack: Trump’s attitude towards Muslims and terrorism. In a party that since George W. Bush left office has grown increasingly anti-Muslim, Graham had been a significant exception. In 2011, he joined Democratic Senator Richard Durbin in convening the first ever Senate hearings on “<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?298715-1/civil-rights-muslim-americans">Protecting the Civil Rights of American Muslims</a>.” And while his Arizona Republican colleague Jon Kyl derided the hearings as an exercise in “political correctness,” Graham <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/dick-durbins-hearing-on-the-civil-rights-of-american-muslims-live-blog/2011/03/29/AFA4WduB_blog.html?utm_term=.1468bc1146d3">insisted</a> that “This is a hearing that we need to have” because “if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.” In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/21/ben-carson-anti-muslim-comment-other-candidates">told</a> him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”</p><p>That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-go-to-hell-ted-cruz/index.html">told</a> CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.” Graham even <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/08/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-go-to-hell-ted-cruz/index.html">attacked</a> Ted Cruz for not denouncing Trump’s ban strongly enough. “This is not a policy debate, Ted. This is about you and us and our character as a party,” Graham thundered. “Up your game. Condemn it, because it needs to be condemned.”</p><p>In Trump’s first months in office, Graham continued to oppose his anti-Muslim scapegoating. In January, he and John McCain became two of the few Republican senators to strongly <a href="https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/1/statement-by-senators-mccain-graham-on-executive-order-on-immigration">condemn</a> Trump’s temporary ban on admitting refugees and travellers from seven majority-Muslim countries. “We should not turn our backs on those refugees who have been shown through extensive vetting to pose no demonstrable threat to our nation,” Graham and McCain argued. “Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism … [it] sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country.” At the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, Graham <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-impeachment-for-torture-waterboarding-lindsey-graham-a7643116.html">warned</a> that if Trump starts “waterboarding people” he may “get impeached.”</p><p>Since then, however, as he and Trump have grown chummier, Graham’s tone has changed. In his Fox interview, Graham twice applauded Trump for recognizing “that we’re in a religious war.” In other words, he applauded Trump for doing exactly the thing Graham has in the past denounced him for doing: defining the war against ISIS as a war against Islam. Graham later explained that, in his mind, this “religious war” is against not Islam per se but merely “a sect in Islam.” But there’s plenty of evidence that Trump doesn’t make such subtle distinctions. Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/index.html">said</a> during the campaign, after all, that, “Islam hates us.” He called for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration. And then he called for halting travel from seven Muslim-majority nations. Once upon a time, those actions outraged Graham. Now he celebrates the mentality behind them.</p><p>Graham also cheered Trump for making “sure when somebody comes into the country from a place where radical Islam, and that’s the enemy, thrives, then we’re going to ask extra hard questions.” But the United States already asked hard questions. Before Trump, as <em>The New York Times </em>has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/29/us/refugee-vetting-process.html">pointed out</a>, America subjected refugees to a 20-step security process so onerous that it took up to two years. Graham once recognized that. In his condemnation of Trump’s first travel ban, he cited the “refugees who have been shown through extensive vetting to pose no demonstrable threat to our nation.” Trump isn’t asking “hard questions.” He’s looking for pretexts to radically slash the number of refugees America takes in. And Graham, who in 2015 <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/09/08/lindsey-graham-calls-us-accept-refugees/71895498/">said</a> that if the U.S. stopped taking its fair share of refugees it should “take the Statue of Liberty and tear it down … because we don’t mean it anymore,” now seems perfectly content with that.</p><p>Under Trump, Graham gleefully told Fox, “The gloves are off.” That’s an odd thing to celebrate given Trump’s very public enthusiasm for torture, and Graham’s very public opposition to it. But Graham is less public about a lot of the issues on which he once opposed Trump. And, as a result, American Muslims seem to have lost one of the few Republicans willing to defend their rights just when they need him most.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedAaron P. Bernstein / ReutersLindsey Graham's 'Religious War'2017-11-02T10:01:00-04:002017-11-02T10:45:47-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544763Once a staunch defender of Muslim Americans and a fierce critic of Trump, the South Carolina senator now endorses the president’s approach to combating terror.<p>Give credit where credit is due. President Donald Trump’s first response to Tuesday’s deadly attacks in New York City was fine. “In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person,” Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/925474979914887168">tweeted</a>. “Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!” Sure, it’s weird to declare “NOT IN THE U.S.A.!” after an attack has just occurred in the U.S.A. But Trump didn’t incite hatred and he didn’t lie. His <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/925490503218589696">second</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/925497025386500096">third</a> tweets were comparatively mild too.</p><p>Can he keep it up? It’s unlikely Trump will stay silent. When the terrorists aren’t Muslim, he’s quite capable of holding his tongue. He said <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40453320/heres-a-roundup-of-trumps-responses-and-non-responses-to-terrorist-attacks">nothing</a> about the six people killed at mosque in Quebec City in January. He was similarly quiet when an African American man was stabbed in a racially motivated attack in New York in March, and when a white supremacist stabbed another African American man in College Park, Maryland, in May. He took six days to address the murder of an Indian American outside Kansas City in February and <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/05/30/too-little-too-late-from-trump-portland-killings/aYdyX06toF0IK55OIRMcIP/story.html">three</a> after a white supremacist murdered two people on a Portland, Oregon, train in May.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>But when the killers are Muslim, Trump grows voluble. And his theme is usually: Muslims have too many rights. After an attack in Paris in November 2015, he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/16/politics/donald-trump-paris-attacks-close-mosques/index.html">told</a> MSNBC that if elected, he’d “strongly consider” closing mosques. That December, after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-united-states/?utm_term=.1727193a3665">proposed</a> a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. The following June, after Omar Mateen killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub, Trump <a href="http://time.com/4367120/orlando-shooting-donald-trump-transcript/">called</a> the Obama administration’s plan to admit Syrian refugees a “better, bigger, more horrible version than the legendary Trojan Horse ever was.” He also claimed that American “Muslims … know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in.”</p><p>It’s been much the same since Trump became president. After an attack in London this June, he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/871143765473406976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fastcompany.com%2F40453320%2Fheres-a-roundup-of-trumps-responses-and-non-responses-to-terrorist-attacks">declared</a> that “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban [on seven majority-Muslim countries] as an extra level of safety!” When terrorists struck Barcelona in August, he <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/898254409511129088">urged</a> Americans to “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught.” In other words, murder Muslim prisoners while desecrating their religion. (Although Pershing <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/pershing-trump-terrorism/537300/?utm_source=feed">didn’t actually do that</a>.)</p><p>Why is it so hard for Trump to stick to the expressions of sadness and resolve that previous presidents deployed after terrorists struck? For starters, such expressions are dull, and Trump rarely misses an opportunity to claim the spotlight. Secondly, they’re aimed at reducing fear whereas Trump thrives on stoking it, especially against people who aren’t Christian or white. The Paris and San Bernardino attacks—and Trump’s incendiary responses to them—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/politics/fear-of-terrorism-lifts-donald-trump-in-new-york-times-cbs-poll.html">boosted</a> him in the polls. Finally, bland statements of solidarity and concern don’t deflect responsibility, which Trump does almost instinctively. Scared people are likely to blame the people who aren’t keeping them safe. As a candidate, Trump focused that blame on Obama and Hillary Clinton. Since then, he’s blamed the courts, the <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/871328428963901440">mayor of London</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/15/trump-once-again-rushes-to-use-an-overseas-terrorist-attack-as-leverage-on-twitter/?utm_term=.e3782b6f4f93">Scotland Yard</a>, and people who are “<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/871325606901895168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fthe-fix%2Fwp%2F2017%2F06%2F04%2Fworld-leaders-call-for-unity-after-london-attack-trump-tweets-the-complete-oppo">politically correct</a>.”</p><p>In the wake of Tuesday’s attack in New York, he could again go after the judges who are impeding his travel ban. But an even easier target would be the mayor of New York. Trump’s anti-Muslim <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/americas-most-anti-muslim-activist-is-welcome-at-the-white-house/520323/?utm_source=feed">allies</a> are <a href="https://twitter.com/ACTBrigitte/status/925468804850823168">already attacking</a> Bill de Blasio for not “monitoring radical mosques.” For now, he’s not following their lead. But if that line of argument hits Fox and Friends, will Trump be able to resist?</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedAndrew Kelly / ReutersThe Attack in Manhattan Poses a Test for Donald Trump2017-10-31T20:43:00-04:002017-11-01T14:10:42-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-544592The president was notably restrained in the wake of an apparent terror attack on Tuesday—that hasn’t often been the case.<p>In his <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2017/10/24/sen-jeff-flake-senate-speech-full-text/794958001/">speech</a> on Tuesday announcing that he won’t seek reelection to the Senate, Jeff Flake denounced the “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior coming from “the top of our government.” Earlier the same day, Bob Corker—also retiring—<a href="http://time.com/4995211/donald-trump-bob-corker-cnn-transcript/">said</a> Donald Trump “debases the country.” In the days to come, George Will will likely say something similar on MSNBC. Charlie Sykes may do so on <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/01/charlie-sykes-returns-to-radio-as-co-host-of-wnyc-show-233594">public radio</a>. Bret Stephens may pen an anti-Trump column in <em>The New York Times</em>.</p><p>Notice a pattern? Plenty of high-profile conservatives still passionately denounce Donald Trump. But few still rely on conservative voters, conservative readers or conservative listeners for their livelihood. Anti-Trump conservatism has become a brain without a body. Intellectually, it remains alive; politically, it’s almost dead.</p><p>Eight months ago, I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/the-anti-anti-trump-right/516474/?utm_source=feed">suggested</a> that on the subject of Trump, you could divide conservative commentators into three categories. Category one were the Trump loyalists: <em>Breitbart</em>, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter.</p><blockquote>
<p>Their base is talk radio. They pride themselves on speaking for those plainspoken, dirt-under-the-fingernails conservatives who loathe not only Hillary Clinton, but Paul Ryan. Their chief enemies are globalism and multiculturalism, which they believe infect both parties, and are destroying America from without and within. Their ideological forefathers are Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan, who claimed that America’s cosmopolitan, deracinated ruling elite had betrayed the white Christians to whom the country truly belonged.</p>
</blockquote><p>Category number two were Never Trump intellectuals who worked for non-conservative publications: David Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Jennifer Rubin.</p><blockquote>
<p>For them, conservatism is about prudence, inherited wisdom, and a government that first does no harm; they see none of those virtues in Trump. They see themselves as the inheritors of a rich conservative intellectual tradition; Trump’s ignorance embarrasses them. And they believe America should stand for ideals that transcend race, religion and geography; they fear white Christian identity politics in their bones.</p>
</blockquote><p>“In between,” I suggested, “are the conservatives who will tip the balance. Unlike <em>Breitbart</em> and company, they generally opposed Trump during the campaign. Unlike Brooks and company, they serve a conservative audience that now overwhelmingly backs him.”</p><p>We now know what has happened to this third group. It has all but disappeared.</p><p>The conservative commentators who could not stomach Trump have largely left conservative media. Last October, Charlie Sykes <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/10/charlie-sykes-to-end-his-radio-show-229102">announced</a> he was leaving his long-running conservative radio show. In January, he <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/01/charlie-sykes-returns-to-radio-as-co-host-of-wnyc-show-233594">announced</a> he was joining public radio. That same month, Megyn Kelly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/business/media/megyn-kelly-nbc-fox-news.html?_r=0">left</a> Fox News for NBC. In January, Fox News <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/01/charlie-sykes-returns-to-radio-as-co-host-of-wnyc-show-233594">announced</a> that it was not renewing George Will’s contract. In May he <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/05/08/george-will-joins-msnbc-238091">joined</a> MSNBC. In April, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>’s most vehemently anti-Trump columnist, Bret Stephens, <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/04/bret-stephens-leaves-wall-street-journal-new-york-times-237176">jumped</a> to <em>The New York Times</em>. Now ensconced in liberal institutions, these commentators are free to condemn Trump with little fear of retribution.</p><p>Flake and Corker are their congressional analogues. Their criticism of Trump made them unpopular among conservative activists. And realizing that such opposition undermined their chances of renomination, they opted to retire, which now leaves them free to criticize Trump without worrying what Steve Bannon thinks. “There may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate,” <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/2017/10/24/republican-senator-jeff-flake-announces-not-running-senate-reelection-gop-primary-ward-trump/793952001/">said</a> Flake in explaining his retirement. Keep your eye out for him on MSNBC.</p><p>If Flake, Corker, Will, Stephens, Kelly, and Sykes have chosen their principles over their constituents, a different set of conservatives have done the opposite. Take Ted Cruz. At last year’s Republican convention, he famously failed to endorse Trump. Now he’s so tight with the Trumpians that Steve Bannon has <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/354641-bannon-is-recruiting-2018-candidates-to-challenge-every-republican">declared</a> him the only GOP senator he won’t try to challenge in 2018. Paul Ryan has largely stopped criticizing Trump, too. The House speaker, who last June accused Trump of “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/politics/paul-ryan-donald-trump-racist-comment/index.html">textbook</a>” racism for attacking Judge Gonzalo Curiel, on Tuesday told reporters to “<a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/paul-ryan-dismisses-trump-corker-twitter-dispute-forget-about-it/">forget about</a>” Corker’s attacks on Trump. According to Ryan, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman accusing the president of leading America “<a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/us/politics/bob-corker-trump-interview-transcript.html?refere">towards World War III</a>” isn’t worth discussing.</p><p>Cruz and Ryan may be cowardly, but they aren’t dumb. They know that <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx">80 percent</a> of Republicans approve of Trump while <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/27/politics/poll-republicans-turning-against-gop-not-trump/index.html">less than 40 percent</a> approve of Republican leaders in Congress, which means that continuing their previous criticism of Trump would likely cost them their jobs.</p><p>Many journalists and media personalities appear to have followed their constituents as well. Since the election, they’ve toned down their criticism of Trump. Last October, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/299982-hugh-hewitt-calls-on-trump-to-withdraw-from-race">called</a> on Trump to exit the presidential race. But last month, Hewitt <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/all-in-all-trump-has-had-a-pretty-good-eight-months/2017/09/19/eeb431f8-9c93-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html?utm_term=.22d03717d12f">rendered</a> a dramatically different verdict: “All in all, Trump has had a pretty good eight months.”</p><p>During the campaign, Glenn Beck <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/glenn-becks-regrets/508763/?utm_source=feed">compared</a> Trump to Hitler and called him an “extinction-level event” for American democracy. Now Beck’s criticisms of Trump are fewer and milder. On October 24, he <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/2017/10/24/yes-russia-is-a-threat-to-the-us-but-its-not-about-trump/?utm_source=homepage&amp;utm_medium=latestfromglenn&amp;utm_campaign=latestfromglenn?utm_source=glennbeck&amp;utm_medium=contentcopy_link">told</a> his readers that, “The threat from Russia is real. But it has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump.” On October 20, after George W. Bush <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/19/politics/bush-speech-trump-bigotry/index.html">attacked</a> the “nativism,” “casual cruelty” and “outright fabrication” sullying American politics, Beck <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/2017/10/20/three-things-you-need-to-know-october-20-2017/?utm_source=glennbeck&amp;utm_medium=contentcopy_link">declared</a> that, “I don’t think [Bush’s comments] were directed at Trump.” Beck still <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/2017/10/12/three-things-you-need-to-know-october-12-2017/">tweaks</a> Trump. But not in the thundering language he used during the campaign. He reserves that for liberals.</p><p><em>National Review</em> has softened its criticisms, too. Yes, the magazine publishes condemnations of Trump, some of them incisive and eloquent. But its editors have shied away from some of the toughest accusations they made during the campaign. In its January 2016 editorial urging conservatives to oppose Trump, the magazine’s editors warned that his brand of populism contained “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430137/donald-trump-conservative-movement-shouldnt-support-him">strong-man overtones</a>.” But on Sunday, its editor Rich Lowry declared that the Trump presidency has brought “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/452982/george-w-bush-ignores-his-role-trump-rise">no budding authoritarianism</a>.” He wrote this two days after Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/20/politics/white-house-sarah-sanders-john-kelly-highly-inappropriate/index.html">declared</a> that it was "highly inappropriate" to contest White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attack on Representative Frederica Wilson because he is a retired four-star general. And 11 days after Trump, attacking NBC for a negative story about him, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/us/politics/trump-nbc-fcc-broadcast-license.html">tweeted</a>, “at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?” And five weeks after Sanders <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09/13/white-house-espns-jemele-hill-should-be-fired-for-calling-trump-a-white-supremacist/?utm_term=.c30cac5e3e26">demanded</a> that ESPN fire host Jemele Hill for calling Trump a “white supremacist.”</p><p>Flake and Corker’s attacks on Trump as they prepare to depart the Senate are part of a larger transformation. Trumpism has taken over the Republican Party and the conservative media, making them less intellectual, more nationalistic, and more bigoted. And that takeover has sparked an exodus of more intellectual, less nationalistic, and less bigoted conservatives into the liberal political and journalistic mainstream. How they remake that mainstream—and are remade by it—will shape American public life in the years to come.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / ReutersAnti-Trump Conservatism Is Politically Dead2017-10-25T06:00:00-04:002017-10-25T10:32:49-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543909Jeff Flake is the latest Republican figure to split with his constituents over Donald Trump, transforming both the party and the American mainstream.<p>When White House Chief of Staff—and Gold Star parent—John Kelly, on Thursday defended Donald Trump’s call to the newly widowed Myeshia Johnson, he was somber and sincere, which is refreshing. But he was wrong.</p><p>Context matters. From another person, at another time, observing that Sergeant La David Johnson “knew what he signed up for” by joining the Army wouldn’t have sparked outrage. But consider what else Representative Frederica Wilson—with the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/10/18/totally-fabricated-trump-disputes-congresswomans-depiction-of-his-exchange-with-soldiers-widow/?utm_term=.61947ac66dcc">backing</a> of Johnson’s mother—has alleged: that Trump didn’t know Johnson’s name; he repeatedly called him “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/us/politics/trump-widow-johnson-call.html">your guy</a>.” And that Trump’s tone was oddly jovial: “<a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/10/18/dem_rep_frederica_wilson_insensitive_trump_told_soldiers_widow_he_knew_what_he_signed_up_for.html">He was almost, like, joking</a>.”</p><p>Above all, consider what we know about the way Trump discusses pain and death. This is the man who <a href="file://localhost/.%E2%80%9D%20https/::www.theatlantic.com:politics:archive:2017:10:trump-puerto-rico-visit:541869:?utm_source=feed">congratulated</a> Puerto Ricans—whose island had been utterly devastated—for losing only “16” and not “thousands of people.” The man who told a crowd in Corpus Christi on August 29, while <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Harvey#Texas_2">30,000 </a>Texans were displaced, “<a href="http://publicpool.kinja.com/subject-travel-pool-report-8-potus-addresses-crowd-1798543294">It’s going well</a>.” And who said after touring the convention center where thousands of Houstonians were taking refuge that, “<a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-houston-1504378477-htmlstory.html">We saw a lot of happiness</a>.”</p><p>Donald Trump minimizes suffering for which he might be held responsible. That’s likely what he was doing in his conversation with Myeshia Johnson. And it’s not just insensitive; it’s dangerous. As the former Missouri Senate candidate, and former Army intelligence officer, Jason Kander <a href="https://twitter.com/JasonKander/status/920667807519592448">observed</a> on Wednesday night on CNN, people say, “He knew what he signed up for” because “they are seeking emotional distance from the situation. People say that because they want to avoid feeling that pain.” That’s worrying, Kander added, because “I want the president, any president … when they’re making a decision about sending people to a dangerous place, I want them to have as one of the things in their mind, the visceral, emotional feeling” that comes from absorbing a widow’s inconsolable grief.</p><p>That’s the key point. Trump’s comments bespeak a refusal to face the human costs of violence and war that could have frightening consequences for American foreign policy.</p><p>Trump loves discussing violence. He does it often, and almost always in the same way. When committed by terrorists, criminals, or protesters, violence is horrific, and its perpetrators are subhuman. (“<a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/30/16060030/trump-dehumanizing-language-latinos">Animals</a>,” is a favorite Trump word.) But when committed by Trump’s side, violence is righteous and heroic, evidence of a functioning moral order. Crucially, it is also cost-free. Trump barely ever admits that violence, when deployed by his side, causes suffering that need disturb his sleep.</p><p>This narrative is part of Trump’s own, self-styled, personal history. He’s <a href="https://rantt.com/donald-trumps-troubling-history-of-violence-8a39f441b618">said</a> that, “In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye. I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled.” The story is likely <a href="https://www.snopes.com/donald-trump-punched-teacher/">invented</a>. But what’s striking is the pride with which he recounts it. Far from expressing something troubling about his character, the incident shows that “I was a very assertive, aggressive kid.” The young Trump exhibited the very qualities he prides himself on today.</p><p>As an adult, Trump assiduously avoided real violence. He gained <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/us/politics/donald-trump-draft-record.html?_r=0">five deferments</a> to avoid service in Vietnam. But he lustily participated in fake, consequence-free violence. His frequent appearances at World Wrestling Entertainment events got him <a href="http://www.wwe.com/videos/donald-trump-enters-the-hall-2013-wwe-hall-of-fame-induction-ceremony">inducted</a> him into the WWE Hall of Fame. At <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_23">WrestleMania 23</a> in 2007, he pretended to <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/features/donald-trump-and-wwe-how-the-road-to-the-white-house-began-at-wrestlemania-20160201">repeatedly punch</a> WWE Chairman Vince McMahon and then, along with two wrestlers, brutally shaved his head while McMahon pretended to plead for mercy and scream in agony. It was simulated torture, and Trump appeared to thoroughly enjoy it.</p><p>Trump still finds the WWE paradigm—candy-corn violence—attractive. In July, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/business/media/trump-wrestling-video-cnn-twitter.html">tweeted</a> a video of himself at WrestleMania repeatedly punching a victim whose face was covered by the CNN logo. In August he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-shares-then-deletes-twitter-post-of-cnn-cartoon-being-hit-by-train.html">retweeted</a> a drawing of a train labelled Trump running over a person labelled CNN (before later deleting it).</p><p>At his campaign rallies, Trump tried to make this cartoon violence real. He often expressed a yearning to beat up protesters and congratulated his supporters when they did so on his behalf. Far from expressing concern that such violence might cause pain or even death, he described such concern as symptomatic of the cultural weakness he was running for president to overcome. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Trump <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/politics/donald-trump-nevada-rally-punch/index.html">exclaimed</a> as a protester was being escorted out of a rally in Las Vegas. “In the old days,” he added, such people were “carried out on stretchers” but unfortunately, “we’re not allowed to push back anymore.” Near Ferguson, Missouri, while bemoaning the time it was taking to eject a demonstrator, Trump <a href="http://mashable.com/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence/#IDJD5t1WYiqu">declared</a> that “part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” As guards removed protesters in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Trump <a href="http://mashable.com/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence/#IDJD5t1WYiqu">said</a> “They used to treat them very, very rough, and when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily.” As a society, he added, “we’ve become weak.” Since becoming president, Trump has tried to rectify this by <a href="http://mashable.com/2017/07/28/trump-police-speech-ms-13/#w2j2.WYtYaqZ">urging</a> police to “please don’t be too nice” with suspects. In August he <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/speaking-to-new-york-cops-trump-once-again-slams-chicago-gun-violence">said</a> “tough police tactics” would stop the violence in Chicago “in a week.”</p><p>Another striking example of Trump’s refusal to face the human consequences of the violence he glorifies comes from his discussion of the NFL. The press has been filled in recent years with stories of former football players driven to suicide by the brain injuries they suffered on the field. But to Trump, they knew what they signed up for. In fact, he’s mocked the NFL for trying to minimize their suffering. Last year, when a woman at a Florida campaign rally passed out and then regained consciousness, Trump <a href="http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/10/donald-trump-mocks-the-nfls-soft-concussion-protocol">declared</a> that, “That woman was out cold, and now she’s coming back. We don’t go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions. ‘Oh, oh! Got a little ding on the head. No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season.’” In Iowa he <a href="http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/10/donald-trump-mocks-the-nfls-soft-concussion-protocol">said</a>, “Football’s become soft like our country has become soft.”</p><p>Trump’s discussion of war is similar. He said last October that veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder were not “<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/trump-veterans-ptsd-not-strong-229050">strong</a>.” He yearns for the good old days when American soldiers did not acknowledge pain, and when law, morality, and empathy did not impede their ability to maim and kill. Trump has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/politics/trump-tweet-pershing-fact-check.html?_r=0">repeatedly cited</a> a bogus story about General John J. Pershing killing Muslim terrorists with bullets smeared in pigs’ blood as his model for fighting terrorism. He’s called for torture techniques far “<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-torture-works-ok-folks/article/2001124">stronger</a>” than waterboarding. And he’s called for <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-terrorists-families/index.html">killing the families</a> of alleged terrorists.</p><p>He perfectly illustrates Robert E. Lee’s famous maxim that, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” Except that Trump won’t admit it’s terrible. By ignoring, or even celebrating, its horror, he gives himself permission to delight in its pageantry and power. He relishes calling his defense secretary “Mad Dog.” He dropped the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan. He shocked Chinese president Xi Jinping when he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/12/trump-xi-jinping-chocolate-cake-syria-strikes">informed</a> him, over chocolate cake, that he had bombed Syria. He relishes public displays of weaponry: In June he flew to France to witness “one of the greatest parades I have ever seen … two hours” of “military might,” and then <a href="https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2017/09/18/who-loves-a-parade-trump-wants-to-showcase-military-might">proposed</a> something similar along Pennsylvania Avenue.</p><p>And he relishes threatening war against North Korea. By one <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/trump-tillerson-north-korea-war/541737/?utm_source=feed">estimate</a>, he has done so five or six times. He’s claimed America will “<a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/19/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly">totally destroy North Korea</a>,” that “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-korea-un-sanctions-nuclear-missile-united-nations.html?_r=0">t</a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/world/asia/north-korea-un-sanctions-nuclear-missile-united-nations.html?_r=0">hey will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen</a>,” (Trump liked that line so much he <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends/status/895223145367355392">tweeted</a> it out <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends/status/895179131037650944">twice</a>), and that if North Korean officials keep threatening the U.S., “<a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911789314169823232">they won’t be around much longer</a>.” Just as striking, Trump almost never mentions the obvious, colossal, human costs such a war would entail. His advisors have surely briefed him on them. But I’m unaware of any public statement, or private vignette, in which he acknowledges them in any meaningful way.</p><p>“I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain way,” Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG6FrgMXcSs">told</a> an Iowa rally in 2015, “But only when we win.” It’s plausible that Trump will avoid war with North Korea because he fears America cannot prevail. It is far less likely that he will avoid war because he can’t bear the human cost. He never bears it.</p><p>That’s what Myeshia Johnson—who has a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and is pregnant, and who said she doesn’t know what she’ll do without her “soulmate”—confronted Trump with: the human cost. The human cost that doesn’t exist in professional wrestling. The human cost, which proves that violence and war aren’t always grand, manly spectacles, and that America doesn’t always win. The human cost, for which Trump, as commander in chief, bears responsibility.</p><p>He couldn’t handle it. His attacks on Wilson suggest he still can’t. He won’t abandon his decades-old intoxication with pretend violence and pretend war. And that makes him a very dangerous man to be leading the most powerful military on earth.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedJoshua Roberts / ReutersWhy Trump Can't Handle the Cost of War2017-10-20T06:00:00-04:002017-10-20T10:10:49-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543492The president relishes bellicose language and performative violence, but seldom acknowledges its human toll.<p dir="ltr">Being a liberal in the Donald Trump era is tricky. On the one hand, you’re grateful for any conservative who denounces the president’s authoritarian lies. On the other, you can’t help but notice that many of the conservatives who condemn Trump most passionately—Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin—remain wedded to the foreign policy legacy of George W. Bush. And in criticizing Trump’s amoral “isolationism,” they backhandedly defend the disastrous interventionism that helped produce his presidency in the first place.</p><p dir="ltr">The godfather of this brand of hawkish, anti-Trump conservatism is John McCain. Sure, McCain—being a Republican Senator—doesn’t condemn Trump as forthrightly as his “neoconservative” allies in the press. But the terms of his critique are similar.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="primary-categorization"></aside><p dir="ltr">Look at his <a href="https://medium.com/@SenatorJohnMcCain/remarks-at-the-2017-liberty-medal-ceremony-8d69751a5ac1">speech</a> on Tuesday after being awarded the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal. In a clear swipe at Trump, McCain warned that, “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history. We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad.”</p><p dir="ltr">As a man, McCain is as honorable as Trump is dishonorable. But this narrative is false. The last seventy-five years of American foreign policy are not the story of a country consistently pursuing democratic ideals, only to see them undermined now by a fearful “blood and soil” isolationism.</p><p dir="ltr">Between 1947 and 1989, the defining imperative of American “international leadership” was anti-communism. At times, anti-communism nurtured ideals of freedom, human dignity and peace. In the name of anti-communism, America protected fragile democracies in West Germany, Italy and Japan. In the name of anti-communism, the United States fed Europe’s starving post-masses via the Marshall Plan. In the name of anti-communism, the United States committed itself to Western Europe’s defense, thus keeping German nationalism in check and laying the groundwork for a postwar economic boom.</p><p dir="ltr">But anti-communism also justified America’s overthrow of elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. It justified Ronald Reagan’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/2233256/Nelson-Mandela-removed-from-US-terror-list.html">decision</a> to label Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress a terrorist organization and America’s longtime <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/world/us-cuts-aid-to-zaire-setting-off-a-policy-debate.html">assistance</a> to the kleptocratic Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. And far from keeping the peace, it led the United States to drop more bombs on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War than it had during World War II.</p><p dir="ltr">Since 1989, this moral duality has continued. The United States has sought to extend its global preeminence while battling a range of enemies—from “rogue states” seeking “weapons of mass destruction” to hyper-nationalists murdering ethnic minorities to jihadist terrorist groups—that challenge the American-led order. During the Gulf War, this imperative led the United States to strengthen the United Nations and defend international law. But during the Iraq War, it led the United States to defy international law and obliterate the Iraqi state, thus creating the conditions for ISIS. In Bosnia and Kosovo, American power helped stop genocide. In Libya, it helped create chaos.</p><p dir="ltr">The point is that American “leadership” sometimes furthers the ideals that Americans revere and sometimes it desecrates them. Sometimes it makes America stronger; sometimes it doesn’t. McCain’s implication is that it’s only when American “abandon[s]” and “refuse[s]” its leadership role that it fails its people and the world. But that’s not true. Over the last fifteen years, in a spasm of military hyperactivity, the United States has toppled governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, in wars that have cost America dearly, and bred more conflict in their wake. Trump won the Republican nomination, in part, because—facing establishment candidates who would not criticize George W. Bush’s foreign policy—he condemned such adventures and pledged to avoid new ones.</p><p dir="ltr">McCain is right to (obliquely) condemn Trump’s hostility to refugees, his indifference to human rights and obsession with ensuring that America’s allies don’t rip it off. But that’s not the same as foreign policy restraint. Sometimes America best serves its people and its ideals by not trying to bend the world to its will. Harry Truman was right to reject preventative war when the Soviet Union was racing towards an atomic bomb; Dwight Eisenhower was right to accept a draw rather than seek the reunification of Korea in 1953; John F. Kennedy was right to admit failure in the Bay of Pigs rather than launch an American invasion of Cuba; George H.W. Bush was right not to march to Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War, and Barack Obama was right to accept an imperfect nuclear deal with Iran rather than risking a fourth war in the greater Middle East.</p><p dir="ltr">John McCain once understood that. As a young congressman in 1985, he <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Icarus-Syndrome-History-American-Hubris/dp/0061456470">told</a> the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> that America was neither “omniscient nor omnipotent. If we do become involved in combat, that involvement must be of relatively short duration and must be readily explained to the man in the street in one or two sentences.” In violating that principle, George W. Bush—with the support of an older John McCain—helped discredit the Republican foreign policy establishment, and lay the groundwork for Trump’s nationalist insurgency.</p><p dir="ltr">Now McCain and many of his hawkish allies are criticizing Trump’s amoral nationalism, which is good. But until they question the disastrous overstretch that helped create it, they will remain his useful ideological foils.</p>Peter Beinarthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/peter-beinart/?utm_source=feedCharles Mostoller / Reuters What John McCain Gets Wrong About Trump's Nationalism 2017-10-17T16:29:24-04:002017-10-17T16:54:37-04:00tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-543183The last seventy-five years of American foreign policy are not the story of a country consistently pursuing democratic ideals, only to see them undermined now by a fearful “blood and soil” isolationism.